Readers unfamiliar with Galeano’s kaleidoscopic presentation may be baffled. Fans of his style will find this a gem.
Never mind James Frey’s modest inventions. Uruguayan writer Galeano (Upside Down, 2000, etc.), with delightful daring, assumes that his story is universal, and that our stories are, too—and they need not even be strictly true.
Galeano’s book, a series of mostly impressionistic vignettes never more than a page long, starts with ponderings on blue-green algae and jumps at once to protohominid footprints along an East African lake. Gradually, historical figures appear, denizens of Iberia and elsewhere in Europe—but wait, for here comes the soccer hero Diego Maradona streaking across the sky, illuminating the ancient houses of Córdoba. Well, time is time, always malleable; and, as Galeano writes, “We are made of time. / We are its feet and its voice. / The feet of time walk in our shoes.” Time is a theme to which Galeano frequently adverts and reverts; historical figures such as Isaac Asimov (pondering why it rains at sea), Christopher Columbus and John Paul III are merely along for the ride. Throughout, Galeano makes cameos, as when he serves as a judge in a sixth-grade writing contest, glad to hear that one little girl loves her teacher because “he’d taught her not to be afraid of being wrong.” As for the real wrongdoers: Suffice it to say that George W. Bush would not be pleased to read these headlines, written as if channeled through Borges, Faulkner, García Márquez and Guevara. The news the author brings consists of anecdote and reminiscence, but more in little-known pieces of history and observation that instruct and admonish. Children suffer and have always suffered, the poor will not inherit the earth and the killers at Columbine “wanted to hijack a plane and crash it into the twin towers in New York.”
Readers unfamiliar with Galeano’s kaleidoscopic presentation may be baffled. Fans of his style will find this a gem.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7767-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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