There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas.
With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s pen, a victim of violence looks to the Himalayas for healing.
When Alter (Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking, 2007, etc.) and his wife, Ameeta, were viciously attacked in their home in the Himalayan foothills in 2008, the prolific writer didn’t know if he would ever put pen to page again. He wasn’t even sure he would be able to walk. With clarity and lyricism, Alter tells how he managed to do both. He also convincingly brings to life the culture, terrain, flora and fauna of the Himalayas. This is not a navel-gazing memoir in which the answers to life’s questions are resolved on a long, meditative walk. Instead, Alter offers a multifaceted consideration of life’s tough truths and stunning splendors. The author aptly describes his approach as “taking dashan” on India’s Bandarpunch and Nanda Devi and Tibet’s Mount Kailash as he travels in the presence of these earthly teachers, observing and absorbing their lessons. Although Alter is by nature a solitary seeker, one senses that he is accompanied not only by the porters he must employ, but also by the diverse group of writers he quotes, ranging from Tenzing Norgay’s take on yeti folklore to Thoreau’s meditation on the virtues of walking. Alter’s own writing is subtle and specific, conveying his shifting perceptions in a way that no sweeping generalizations ever could. A self-professed atheist, the author’s writing is nonetheless deeply spiritual, as when he writes about the prayer flags he would design to hang from the Himalayan hemlocks: “a deconstructed rainbow, cross-referenced by the breeze.” The combination of realism and mysticism makes this a rich, satisfying memoir that plumbs the depths—and acknowledges the limits—of both man and mountain.
There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62872-510-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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