A lifelong magazine journalist files a striking travelogue of life, inspiration and encouragement for fellow retirees, equally intriguing for anyone who appreciates intellect and wit.
Rowan (First Dogs: American Presidents and Their Best Friends, 2009, etc.) employs simple yet sophisticated prose, as well as an amazing capacity for detail and memory, in this chronicle of his personal experiences, relationships and globetrotting. Details of the author's breathtaking and sometimes dangerous career—from dodging bullets on the front lines of the Korean War to unforgettable audiences with world leaders, American presidents and celebrities, are interwoven with the stuff of real life—including his battle with cancer, his passion for jogging and more than 50 years of marriage to wife Helen. Despite his entry into the nonagenarian register, the author never lost his edge or his hope and thirst for knowledge, proving that one man or woman's life can influence and even change history, regardless of age. His account proves that with dogged determination, even those with reduced mobility—a natural consequence of old age—can adapt and discover new interests and joys. His prose is poetic and replete with colorful literary and philosophical quotes from renowned writers and thinkers. Rowan has a keen eye for detail, and his experiences, as he so aptly writes, are no "manual for growing old gracefully." This book is more than memoir; it will serve as inspiration to anyone who fears loss or stagnation in old age.
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6376-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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