A worthy addition to Colorado literature.
Amiable, bookish wanderings along paths blazed by a genteel lady in the Rockies more than a century ago.
Root, a retired professor from Michigan, tracks the English travel writer Isabella Bird, whose A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains was published in 1879. Recounting a season’s exploration of the mining towns and byways above modern Denver, Bird’s book did not, as Root quietly notes, really describe “a life”—and other women had written about the region before Bird got there. But she hit the zeitgeist, and, as one later editor observed, gave early voice to the preservationist impulse that would lead to the protection of Estes Park and other places. Root writes more prosaically than Bird, who was given to bursts of Victorian purplishness, but he has a well-honed appreciation for such things as how the sky of the Great Plains meets the towering mountains. While admitting to a touch of acrophobia, he has no fear of traveling vertiginous mountain roads “strewn with fallen rocks the size and shape of urban telephone books” in pursuit of just the right all-commanding overlook. “I concede to her the prize for pluck and perseverance, for resolve and resilience,” he writes. “By comparison, I’m rather wussy and don’t intend to be otherwise.” Perhaps so, but Root is no slouch. It’s true that Bird traveled by horseback and Root by compact car and other motorized vehicles, but they share qualities and concerns, finding plenty of untraveled stretches of all-too-busy Colorado to write about and marveling at them. Root also does a nice job of bringing Bird to life by reminding readers of her relationship with a wily mountain man who appeared to her in a faraway vision on the night he was shot to death—“a quirky story,” he notes, that reminds us that Bird was “complex and problematic.”
A worthy addition to Colorado literature.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4018-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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