In her second collection of New York Times pieces, Quindlen (Object Lessons, 1991, etc.) lets loose with her trademark intelligence, fervor, and personal focus on topics ranging from the Gulf War through absent fathers to the controversy over abortion. ``But is it really necessary for you to wear your gender on your sleeve?,'' an eager young journalist once asked the author. Citing her role model, editorialist Dorothy Thompson (who when told she had ``the brains of a man'' insisted she was ``altogether female''), Quindlen reiterates her belief that she owes it to herself, to the female reporters who broke ground for her generation at the Times, and to her readers to comment on world events from her underrepresented and valuable female viewpoint. Writing with greater maturity and depth than in her ``Life in the 30s'' column (Living Out Loud, 1988), she confidently proceeds to filter the abortion issue through her own experience as a Catholic mother of three; consider euthanasia from the perspective of a dying man's wife; observe her daughter's second birthday while considering that women as a whole still earn less than men; mull over the premature revelation of Arthur Ashe's case of AIDS from the point of view of a seasoned reporter; and lambast the Times, as a journalist and a woman, for revealing the name of the alleged rape victim in the William Kennedy Smith trial. Whimsical moments appear sporadically (Quindlen predicts the next movie blockbuster, Mom Alone), but rage surfaces more frequently from this woman writing in what she—perhaps optimistically—calls ``a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves.'' ``I'd love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman,'' one newspaper editor candidly told Quindlen. Until the quota increases past one, here's a way for more readers to fall in love with at least one woman's very personal brand of passion.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40711-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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