A minor but pleasing entry in Bass’ body of work.
Prolific nature writer Bass (The Black Rhinos of Namibia, 2012, etc.) offers a view of fine country and his family’s past through the scope of a rifle.
The author has long been a naturalist and novelist laureate of the Montana mountains, but here he returns home to Texas to ponder the ways of the old folks, four generations of Basses who passed glorious time in the rougher patches of the Hill Country. Life always entails death, of course. That’s the primary lesson of hunting, and of family history too; as Bass writes, “Each generation, I think, learns less and less about death, these days, rather than more—and so here I am, in this room full of old people….I wonder how often they think about it.” The author thinks often about the Hill Country’s abundant population of deer, who by his account, offer themselves up as a “gift of the land” in the old social contract of predator and prey. It’s a subject fraught with the possibility of being misread, given modern sensibilities, but there’s nothing of the yahoo or land-rapist in Bass’ approach either to hunting or to writing about it. Along the way, the author writes gracefully of the geology of the region, with its sandstones and feldspars and “nuggets and gravels that we call chat, which is a beautiful pink-rose color,” and of the spirit of the place, whose tongue “is the language of water…cutting down to the heart and soul of the earth, to a thing that lies far below and beyond our memory.” Those outraged at the thought of doing Bambi in may not be won over by the sometimes self-conscious lyricism, but anyone who has spent time in the Hill Country will recognize the author’s authenticity.
A minor but pleasing entry in Bass’ body of work.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-292-73795-2
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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