Well written and passionate, though frequently frustrating.
A literary journey through memory to childhood in 1950s Hawaii.
For novelist Moore (One Last Look, 2003, etc.), the sea is a wild, ever-present reality: “It was always there, and I was always in it.” In this mix of memoir and anthology—a stilted, irritating format—the author discusses her distant home, “a ravishing little world…an isolated place, redolent with romance.” Like many writers, Moore read voraciously as a child, borrowing books from the Adults Only shelves at the local library. In 1954, she recalls, Robinson Crusoe inspired her at age eight to build “a lean-to made of palm fronds, stocked with old ropes, carefully-rendered maps of hidden treasure and hemp bags of dried fruit and stale bread.” Robinson Crusoe led her to Treasure Island, which led her to Typhoon. She began to keep a notebook of copied passages from the books she read, most highlighting the literature of the sea. This book is, presumably, a showcase of these discoveries; Moore includes short snippets from (among others) Hesiod, Keats, Thoreau, Woolf, Dickinson and Chekhov, along with, most interestingly, a passage from Isabella Bird’s Six Months in the Sandwich Islands and a tale from “His Hawaiian Majesty King Kalakaua.” The highlights of this short tome are the author’s far-too-infrequent sprints back into her youth. She describes roaming freely through wild country without fences or boundaries, picking guavas, lichees and Surinam cherries when she was hungry, digging up rare ferns for replanting indoors. She had a pet spider; she went everywhere barefoot. She slid down flumes that irrigated the pineapple fields, a forbidden pastime, and after a rainfall used giant ti leaves to sled down the ancient Hawaiian he’e holua slides. Moore grew up in a Hawaiian paradise where ethereal myth and corporeal pursuits commingled. Her book is most delightful when she draws on her memories, disappointing when she quotes disruptively and at length from her favorite texts.
Well written and passionate, though frequently frustrating.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1862-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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