Occasionally heavy handed, but offers a unique perspective on the intersection of man and wild.
The wolfman reveals his human side.
Living with the Wolfman star Ellis teams with veteran ghostwriter Junor (My Life, My Way, 2009, etc.) to share his life story. Born in a remote village on England’s northeastern coast, Ellis lived most of his youth with his farming grandparents, from whom he learned essential values about order in the animal kingdom. Two early deaths proved formative to Ellis’s ethic that more civilized behavior is often found in the forest: that of the central figure in his life, his grandfather, when the author was 13, and the trapping of a fox kit he had studied for months. “Looking back,” writes the author, “there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox—my friend—hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.” This tension of being caught between worlds permeates much of the book, which centers on the many empirical conclusions about wolf behavior that he drew from months of living with them in the wilds of Idaho, Poland and England. The author’s descriptions of his firsthand experiences—a pack’s acceptance of him as a lower member; one wolf’s sensitivity that forged bonds with an emotionally challenged boy otherwise unable to connect with humans—are more engaging than the polemical lectures on ecology and conservation. “Everything has a place in this world,” writes Ellis, “and we can’t be naïve enough to think we can safeguard ourselves if we let other species fail.”
Occasionally heavy handed, but offers a unique perspective on the intersection of man and wild.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-46453-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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