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TRAVELS

Most Crichton books are champion sports-cars: sleek, high-powered, engineered for an quick evening spin. This time, however, the master of the compelling read (The Andromeda Strain, Congo, etc.) tosses some jalopies in with the Ferraris in this mostly satisfying collection of 38 essays on inner- and outer-voyaging. What a traveler he is! Mt. Kilimanjaro, Bangkok, the mountains of Pakistan, the seas of Bonaire, even "Shangra-La" (the Himalayan outpost of Hunza). Objectives vary: treasure-hunting, animal-watching, mountain-climbing, whorehouse-hopping. He's at his best in the nature pieces, especially in an outstanding description of stalking a troop of mountain gorillas ("Gorillas"), an essay that captures the eeriness and poignancy of this dying branch of the proto-human tree. Many entries ("Kilimanjaro," "Cactus Teachings") describe moments of self-discovery, while a few ("Jamaica") bog down in fussing over personal relationships. Some seem to have no point at all, beyond Crichton's desire to screen his favorite home movies. A breed apart are the essays on inner space, in which Crichton comes across like a sober Shirley MacLaine as he happily chomps his way through channeling, clairvoyance, meditation, power spots, and other New Age goodies. This out-on-a-limb stuff culminates in a masterful defense ("Postscript: Skeptics at Cal Tech") of the legitimacy of parapsychological research, one of the best essays of its kind anywhere. Also noteworthy: nine essays recalling his traumatic days at Harvard Medical School. Considering the decline in quality of Crichton's novels (culminating in the silliness of Sphere) and the excellence of many of these essays, one wonders whether his mature talent doesn't flourish best in nonfiction. With a bit of pruning, this would have been a brilliant travel album. As it is, the memorable snapshots easily outnumber the turkeys.

Pub Date: April 25, 1988

ISBN: 0060509058

Page Count: 404

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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