Tales from a rich, cross-cultural life by a renowned Indian peace activist. Kumar’s exceptional spiritual journey began at age nine, when he was accepted into training as a Jain monk. He learned Sanskrit, meditation, and extreme discipline (one of the rigors of the order was to have one’s hair plucked, not cut, from the head), but as an adolescent he began to question the purpose of the life of solitude and study. He left the monkhood and attended university, became entrenched in the ideology of Gandhi, and entered into an arranged (and passionless) marriage, which ended abruptly as his commitment to itinerant peace activism grew. Kumar began traveling the globe, preaching of the need for nuclear disarmament, worker’s unions, and organic farming. Most of these travels he made on foot, walking from village to village through India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, continental Europe, England (which he reached by train), and finally America (arriving on board the Queen Mary, thanks to a generous sponsor). The latter half of the book is absorbed with a more settled life, as Kumar founded an activist English newspaper called Resurgence, married again and had two more children, and tried his hand at small-scale organic farming in the English countryside. Now in his 60s, Kumar still makes walking pilgrimages, especially around milestone birthdays. In monk’s fashion, along the way he has simply trusted in the hospitality of whomever he might meet at his daily destination, and most of the stories testify to the universal kindness of individuals. For a freewheeling wanderer, he fills this autobiography with many niggling details that weigh it down (precisely how the auction prices proceeded for his English farm, exactly which vegetarian dishes were served at people’s homes, etc.). Yet this concrete attention to minutiae also prevents the memoir from becoming mired in the many abstract ideals Kumar embraces, and grounds it in refreshing reality.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16402-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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