Surface glibness, and a boys’-club tone only slightly distract from a deeper insight and charm.
An Army public-affairs officer stumbles through a decidedly unglamorous first year in the frozen north.
His knowledge of Alaska gleaned principally from episodes of Northern Exposure, Lieutenant Flynn, sweating on a base in Mississippi, requested a transfer to Eielson Air Force Base, 400 miles north of Anchorage. A short time later, the cheechako (“a tenderfoot, a greenhorn”) arrived at his new home on a night when the temperature was 43 degrees below zero. His first weekend, playing rugby on a frozen river, he realized that distraction and denial were the ways to make it through the Alaskan winter. Taking to these strategies with gusto, Flynn amused himself by creating a monthly column for the military newspaper covering some of Alaskan life’s more striking aspects: the difficulty of really getting away from it all despite being surrounded by wilderness; the abysmal state of waste disposal; the Native American “Ear Pull” competition. Getting this column approved was a challenge; the Air Force was used to public-affairs officers pitching stories about survival school and plane crashes. (Flynn covered those too.) Alternating between pondering Alaskan and Air Force curiosities, the author displays a time-honored attitude toward military bureaucracy: good-natured grousing. He is quite amusing, for example, in such slice-of-life pieces as his account of working on an outdoor sign when it was 68 degrees below zero, a general consideration of the drudgery of base chores, and an analysis of the pecking order and mating habits of the officers (a mere flack, Flynn was completely eclipsed by the pilots). Equally compelling are his explanation of flying’s central importance to Alaska’s survival and a description of his first encounter with the local tribes.
Surface glibness, and a boys’-club tone only slightly distract from a deeper insight and charm.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28554-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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