Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency,...
The second of a two-volume autobiography (Reason for Hope, 1999) in letters that allows readers to enter the daily life of famed primatologist Goodall.
To label Goodall a primatologist feels particularly limiting after reading these letters, for they reveal her as an astute behaviorist of many creatures (including her husbands), a wonderful mother, someone deeply moved by (and moved to act on) the cruelty inflicted on humans and animals, a reveler in life, and a survivor. Editorial notes from Peterson set the stage, and allow for an understanding of Goodall’s more elliptical remarks. The correspondence ushers us into Goodall’s everyday world—sometimes in Europe and America, but often in the field, where her love of her son Grub melds with her love of such places as Arusha, in Tanzania: “Grub and I have spent our nights at the ‘Golden Grass Den.’ In the evening the setting sun gives every dried blade a gleam of gold, brilliant as metal.” Although chimpanzees have been the focus of her lifelong work, Goodall’s interests are vast (“We have been doing a number of tests on Egyptian Vultures in Ngorongoro Crater with reference to their stone throwing behavior”), and her reflections are broad-ranging and wide. Although she speaks of her husbands with considerable reserve (it was during this period in her life that she divorced Hugo van Lawick and lost Derek Bryceson to cancer), her descriptions of animals are vibrant and arresting—speaking of one of her chimps who was captured for medical research, she observes, “The easiest and most common way to acquire a baby chimpanzee in Africa is to shoot the mother and then pull off the clinging infant.”
Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency, and goodness.Pub Date: July 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-12520-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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