A charming narrative for avid birders and armchair nature lovers, sure to inspire at least a few flights of fancy.
One of the world’s foremost birders reflects on his life in nature, which has always “kept me young through a sense of wonder.”
Emanuel has spent his entire life observing birds, beginning with his childhood in Houston, when, “like some boys, I was interested in just about anything that was alive—birds, butterflies, crayfish, snakes, turtles, fish.” Since then, the author has traveled to every continent and chronicled more than 6,000 species of birds, and his birding tour company, Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, which he founded in 1976, is held in high regard within the ecotourism world. In his memoir, the author reminisces about his countless experiences with birds and the opportunities that have blossomed around that interest. Emanuel caught the nature bug early and particularly enjoyed the many wonderful winged creatures he encountered around his hometown. By the time he was 10, he had participated in his first Audubon Christmas Bird Count. His lifelong passion has led to deeply satisfying relationships with other birders including Roger Tory Peterson, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Laura Bush. In 1985, after a few of his colleagues left VENT to start their own company, Emanuel came to a realization about what he wanted to do next. “I wanted to create an educational adventure for youngsters,” writes the author, “so they could learn to identify birds, understand their life zones, and appreciate the environmental role that birds play in nature….I found solace in this new endeavor because it was focused on serving the next generation of birders.” Whether he is recounting his experiences with raptors in Turkey, rose-ringed parakeets in India, or black-and-white owls in Panama, Emanuel’s love of the natural world is always on display.
A charming narrative for avid birders and armchair nature lovers, sure to inspire at least a few flights of fancy.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1238-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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