Sometimes achingly snooty, but in his stride Korda brings an engagingly lofty hand, both intimate and erudite, to the horses...
In this catalogue of horses and horse folk who have passed through the author’s life, the animals possess tactility while the people are simply too-too.
For someone who has “always tried to avoid a single-minded obsession about horses,” veteran editor and author Korda (Another Life, 1999, etc.) has certainly spent a fair amount of time around the beasts and has thought long, hard, and well about their place in the world, in particular their relationship to humans. So he can be counted among those people who “love horses, or who know horses, or who make their living out of horses, or who just can’t imagine what their lives would be like without horses.” Korda’s hungry curiosity to get into a horse’s head and his interest in the social history of equestrianism give Horse People its charm and energy. He tells us much here about conformation and disposition, pasterns that are too long, the irregularity of hooves, fitting “within the square,” enveloping all of it in a sense of affection. Less attractive is the depthless snobbishness of this world inhabited by the super-well-groomed super-rich, “old-school, good-looking, soft-spoken, wealthy, with perfect manners and a wardrobe full of the kind of country clothes Ralph Lauren has since made a fortune imitating.” (Not that they don’t have their travails: “Sheila, like many horse people, had given way to globalism, in the sense that the bulk of her barn help was Mexican.”) A moderate windiness is excusable considering the sheer volume of material, but not such perfume-thick, studied prose as the “flash of orange, moving slowly” and “somewhere there is a picture of me on a small, shaggy pony at the age of about six,” especially when the photo is reproduced a half-inch below.
Sometimes achingly snooty, but in his stride Korda brings an engagingly lofty hand, both intimate and erudite, to the horses that have shaped his life. (17 line drawings by the author, 24 b&w photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621252-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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