The bizarre life of a daredevil pioneer pilot, trained in the Wright Brothers” school, who became a visionary inventor, entrepreneur, spellbinding salesman of possibilities rather than solid achievements, showman, engineer (MIT), manipulator of trusting investors” vanishing capital, liar, and deadbeat, of whom it was said he spent more time in bankruptcy court than in church. Mansfield (In the Memory House, not reviewed, etc.) attempts to bring to life a complex, extraordinary personality in rapidly changing times of developing technology. Few early pilots (1908—11) died a natural death as they sought to understand and master aerodynamics, changing winds that threatened the stability of flimsy biplanes, and temperamental engines suddenly losing power. Atwood often risked death as he learned by trial and error. To maintain a precarious living, barnstorming aviators became daring stuntmen in a circus atmosphere of cheering crowds at state fairs. The restless Atwood showed great imagination and worked many hours to gain hundreds of patents. To attract research money, he wove together truth and lies with partial successes and failures. Mansfield writes of Atwood’s wealth and poverty succeeding each other as he strove to become the Henry Ford of aviation—designing, manufacturing, and selling his product. During WWII he contributed to the famous Higgins boat, essential in invasions that helped to achieve victory. He also led a complicated private life, marrying five times and becoming an adoring yet despotic father, walking away from his children for extensive periods. Before dying at 83, Atwood had a warm reunion with his family, long scattered by geography and time. Mansfield likens Atwood to the skylark, because he had the instincts of a bird flying as high as he could in a kind of limitless space. A large slice of America’s not-well-known past and of an eccentric genius who helped develop modern aircraft. A well- researched, honest evaluation of a man and his times.
Pub Date: April 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-891-1
Page Count: 324
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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