An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.
A posthumous collection of essays and musings by a well-traveled man.
Thomas “Tom” Peyton, born in Duluth, Minn., saw many of the world’s sights over the course of his 91 years, from the Eiffel Tower to Ivory Coast. Although his debut memoir focuses primarily on his international travel, his memories of his Midwestern upbringing also appear. For example, in his opening essay, “Domestic Animals in My Life,” he offers an overly extensive history of his family’s dogs. However, readers may have liked to have learned more about the people in his “eminently Victorian household,” over which his father “ruled.” Peyton also recalls his encounters with several iconic historical figures—some at a great distance, others close enough for a handshake. As a spectator at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, 17-year-old Peyton found Adolf Hitler to be “a small man of undistinguished shape and clothed in…rather ill-fitting military garb.” He adds, rather chillingly: “This was the man destined to play such a huge part in…the future of every one of us.” Of his service in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Peyton writes, “I never left an occupation more willingly.” He joined the Peace Corps in 1962, answering what he called his “ethical demands,” and met President John F. Kennedy in the process. Peyton’s time in the Peace Corps inspired some of his best writing, not only in his memoirs, but also in his letters to his mother, in which he detailed the joys and frustrations of teaching in Ivory Coast. His sense of humor and prose skills also emerge, as in his description of “colonial society”: “[H]eavy men purple with drink and very liverish; women waiting only to be repatriated, totally without curiosity toward the world in which they find themselves.” The writing veers toward dry reportage when he chronicles his travels later in life, joined by his friend Osama Ettouney. Peyton eventually covered a truly impressive amount of ground, including Egypt, Greece, the Czech Republic, Italy, Brussels, Portugal and Luxembourg. At times, the author’s visual imagery is sharp (as when he describes “[e]meralds the size of a giant’s fingernail” in Istanbul, but more often, he simply retells the history of the world he so eagerly explored.
An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490593616
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
