A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance....
The first publication of a long-lost work by revered Appalachian writer Dykeman (1920-2006).
Written in the early 1940s, just after her graduation from Northwestern University, Dykeman’s observations on nature display her charming ability to remember small joys: sitting on a rock near the creek watching life floating by over the creek bed, a luna moth in flight, the sounds and feel of the country. Her intimacy with water is evident as her descriptions transport readers into the moment: rain, puddles, mists, walking in damp earth, and even the smell of newness after a flood. Her stories of the first 14 years of her life evoke the innocence of childhood before we lose the sense of incredibility and uniqueness of things. Predating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by almost 20 years, Dykeman’s work bemoans the negative changes to nature: the housing booms and the losses of woodlands, habitats, and, mostly, solitude, something her father introduced to her as a singular freedom. A person who lives with nature is the only truly real person, compelled only by natural laws—laws so primal and universal that they also rule the lives of plants and animals. In addition to the author’s abiding affinity for nature, she has a beautiful, lyrical writing style. Throughout her life, she ached to satisfy her imagination not with facts but with the feel of things. Dykeman grew up near Asheville, North Carolina, and her father, 60 when she was born, was her light, her guide, and her muse. He and her mother, more than 35 years younger, took their only child for walks in their woods, to the creeks, hollows, and meadows, reveling in everything they saw—and it shows in this enjoyable series of reflections.
A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance. Anyone who has lived in the countryside, or wished they had, will enjoy Dykeman’s celebration of nature.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2914-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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