Though cast against the brilliant red tones of the Australian outback, this slim volume tells a monotone tale of self-discovery. Fuller (Nima: A Sherpa in Connecticut, 1984, etc.) stalks the spiritual, but her language is too thin, and her discoveries are trite. When her off-Broadway play flops miserably and she finds herself tormented by the imminent death of a dear friend suffering from AIDS, she takes to the road with her teenage son in search of revelation in the Australian outback. Fuller rents a house that she soon fears is inhabited by a ghost. Good fortune and abiding spirits bring her to Max Eulo, a warm-hearted Aborigine who leads her into his world and the discovery of the Aboriginal ancestor whose spiritual home she now inhabits. He teaches her to put her ear to the ground and listen for messages from a more meaningful realm. She consults Ouija boards, tracks the calls of rare birds, indulges in deep-breathing exercises, and listens for the plaintive sound of the didgeridoo pipe. At last, a spirit doctor announces that ``the spiritual gateway has been lifted for her to enter.'' Along the way, Fuller rediscovers her profoundly midwestern upbringing, and the depth of her pain over the death of her first husband and her friend's battle with AIDS. She abandons the confines of her Connecticut home, frees her son from blue- bubble-gum and B-Ball madness, and watches for the sun rising in the outback. It is a long way to travel, and harder still to know how much she has learned because of the outback, Max Eulo, or simply the functions of distance and time. While the itinerant melody of the didgeridoo haunts this tale, one can never hear it quite clearly enough to call it genuinely original. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14895-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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