A delightful story of a boy, his birds, and his pursuit of knowledge in spite of society’s dictates.
How catching and training a kestrel changed the life of a young British boy.
When Hines was 11, he failed his exams for grammar school. Unable to attend with his older brother, the author was sent to the secondary modern school, “where my education didn’t matter.” That was his first introduction to the English class system in the mid-1950s. Always a naturalist at heart, Hines soon was reading all he could find regarding falconry. It was near Tankersley Old Hall that he took his first kestrel, called Kes, and began training her. Now a true autodidact, his reading led him to T.H. White, T.E. Lawrence, and J.G. Mavrogordato, author of A Falcon in the Field. In hopes of visiting countries with a history of falconry—e.g., Sudan, India, and nations in the Middle East—Hines applied to join the Voluntary Service Overseas. The author was posted to Nigeria, where he was exposed to members of the fading British Empire and their racist, classist attitudes as well as native anger against their former rulers. Hines’ return to England, where he was to begin an environmental studies program, coincided with the making of a film based on his brother’s book about his kestrel training. The author trained three kestrels and served as falconer for the film, though his brother initially took all the credit. Throughout his memoir, Hines provides captivating descriptions and explanations of training the kestrels and how to “hack” them back to the wild, and the author’s love of his subject inevitably shows through. His discovery that the upper-class world of falconry wouldn’t have welcomed him once again exposed the social divisions of his country. His love of falconry and the environment influenced his life, and that obsession drove him to learn the history of his own class and become a television producer and director.
A delightful story of a boy, his birds, and his pursuit of knowledge in spite of society’s dictates.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-502-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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