A moving homage and an adventure story that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity.
Blue Ridge Outdoors editor in chief Harlan intimately and expansively profiles a fearless Southern island dweller.
A small, bridgeless barrier island off the Georgia coast, Cumberland is home to countless endangered species and three major ecosystem regions. It is also home to Carol Ruckdeschel, a self-taught biologist who has integrated herself into the lush landscape and lived off the land for much of her adult life. Harlan met this intrepid “Jane Goodall of sea turtles” while he was a park ranger and shadowed her for two decades, impeccably documenting in field notes and journals her ramshackle cabin life of “packrat practicality.” Ruckdeschel was a rowdy only child born during the early stages of World War II, a solitary, curious tomboy who skipped church to commune with feral cats and turtles while her father taught her to shoot rifles and appreciate liquor. Her interest in the biological world bled into young adulthood; she was obsessed with dissecting animal carcasses as she taught herself outdoor skills and drank, which expelled her from college. Undeterred, Ruckdeschel immersed herself in natural history studies and married the first of her three husbands, all of whom she would divorce. Perhaps to soothe a broken heart, Harlan presumes, she retreated for the marshes and mountains of Cumberland, where she has resided as an increasingly feral inhabitant ever since. Her grass-roots activism has kept her spirited love of the island and its wild inhabitants sustained as she forcefully combats developers thirsty to capitalize on the land’s natural resources and sweeping vistas. Harlan’s painstaking detailing of the island’s history includes the legacy of the Carnegie family and the ruins of their antebellum plantation houses and mansions. Ruckdeschel’s extremist legacy and tireless wilderness preservation campaigns are sweepingly recorded here in arresting detail.
A moving homage and an adventure story that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2258-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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