A brick of a memoir that carries very little real weight.
A New York City intellectual recalls his childhood in Davenport, Iowa.
This debut memoir by widely published essayist Miller aspires to fall somewhere between John Kennedy Toole and David Sedaris, but there is little humor in this stream-of-consciousness narrative about the minutia of Midwestern life. The author attempts to lionize a supposedly tough childhood that turns out to be quite ordinary, despite Miller’s best efforts to lend pregnant pause to every mundane detail. The mere choosing of a Christmas tree inspires this passage: “The obvious connection between this emaciated pine and Charlie Brown’s unfortunate tree-lot pick was not voiced by anyone. Or, I should say, could not be voiced, lest we admit our life was a cartoon, and ridiculous as circumstances often were, always, on some level, they remained very real, too.” For the most part, we are bystanders to the panoramic film playing out behind young Miller’s eyes, as he aspires to be a writer and makes grand observations about his family and neighbors. His Writers’ Studio, a group of misfit scribblers, is given surprisingly short shrift, but much drama is inspired by the author’s three “mean sisters,” one of whom is ultimately the victim of her own tragic story. Miller also gives much play to elderly neighbors like Mr. Hickey, a cigar-puffing widower whose ephemera spills across the pages like a still life. There’s no doubt that the author has a gift for language, but the recklessness with which he wields his talent takes the spark out of the story. There is also a degree to which he attempts to demonize his now deeply estranged family—he deliberately distanced himself for years while simultaneously wallowing in his own remembrances—that makes the memoir’s primary subject come off as self-pitying and thin-skinned.
A brick of a memoir that carries very little real weight.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9849000-0-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Lookout Books
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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