A captivating history of two men who dramatically changed their contemporaries’ view of the past.
Daring adventurers unearth a buried civilization.
In his thrilling debut history, journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Carlsen traces the arduous journeys of lawyer John Lloyd Stephens and architect/artist Frederick Catherwood into the jungles of Central America. Both seasoned travelers to Rome, Greece, and throughout the Middle East, in 1839, when the two boarded a ship bound for the Gulf of Honduras, they had read only “vague reports of intricately sculpted stones” hinting at the existence of “a hidden unknown world.” Those reports, and the intrepid voyages of naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt, fueled their “hunger for adventure, the quest, the whiff of danger.” Danger proved more than a whiff on 2,500 miles of life-threatening travel—both men contracted malaria and other tropical diseases, and civil wars raged—as they pursued their dream. In a battered Toyota, Carlsen followed their footsteps, and he evokes in palpable detail the tangled forests, punishing deserts, and cliffhanging mountain paths that they traversed. Stephens and Catherwood had no idea what to expect: common knowledge had it that Central America had been inhabited by primitive indigenous tribes. But they found shocking evidence of a sophisticated culture. “Architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory had lived and passed away,” Stephens wrote in a travel book, impressively illustrated by Catherwood, that became a bestseller. “It was a mystery,” Carlsen writes, “of staggering implications.” As the “acknowledged progenitor of American archaeology,” Stephens could only guess at what he had found: he lacked the methodology and tools that would enable later archaeologists to date findings and flesh out Mayan history. A subsequent trip in 1841 yielded another volume, so eagerly anticipated that it was a bestseller even before “rapturous reviews” appeared.
A captivating history of two men who dramatically changed their contemporaries’ view of the past.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240739-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
