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Archive for October, 2006

October 2006: A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Posted in canticle for leibowitz, discussion, science fiction on October 4, 2006 | 6 Comments »

A Canticle for Leibowitz, the 1959 award-winning sci-fi book by Walter M. Miller, Jr., is the first selection for The Librarium book blog. It might seem a bit of a leap for an introductory selection, but the book, broken into three parts, strikes that odd and perfect balance of humor with an undercurrent of darkness. [...]

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We are people who love to read and discuss books, and The Librarium is a web-based reading and discussion group. All that is required is for you to read the selected book and then add your comment(s) to the discussion. If you would like to suggest a book for future reading please click on the "Suggest a Book" tab, or if you would like to be added as an author for this blog, please use the contact form tab. We hope you will join us!

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Our Current Read – Into the Wild

From Amazon.com
"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer.
While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams."
Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.
From Publishers Weekly
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature.
Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.
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Archive for October, 2006

October 2006: A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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