Still, Askins’s work has helped reshape the relationship Americans have with wild creatures.
A moving and affective, if overwrought, tribute to the wild.
Askins, who led the wolf recovery program at Yellowstone National Park in the late ’80s and early ’90s, has never been a stranger to wilderness. She spent her youth in northern Michigan and then moved to the foothills of the Tetons, embracing nature in all its unpredictable and nurturing aspects: not just through coming to have a sense of place, but through knowing the independent presence of wild animals, being aware of the “other” that was nonetheless kith on some fundamental level. The author manages to intertwine the evolution of her philosophy—in part, to relinquish our need to control and give rein to the elemental spirit within us—with her passion for wildlife and her political role as a peacemaker/activist for the Wolf Fund. Askins was even willing to don the lobbyist’s togs in an effort to change attitudes toward the reintroduction of wolves to one of their native habitats—successfully so because she was canny enough to entertain the emotions on both sides of the issue, to seek solutions rather than compromises, and to keep her perspective when “the maze of ethics becomes complicated in the face of the potential loss of an entire species” (for example, when golden eagles are feast on the eggs of endangered sandhill cranes). Occasionally, she trots out preposterous generalizations (“The fox is to easterners what the coyote is to most westerners”); more often, in fact pretty much nonstop, she overwrites. It pains her to leave a noun undraped by a compound adjective, a lively adverb often enough thrown in.
Still, Askins’s work has helped reshape the relationship Americans have with wild creatures.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-48222-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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