The author's twelve years on Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, combine tribulations with trivia, domesticity with manifold doings, and plaints with paeans. Marriage to Don during the war brought almost insoluble housing problems in Seattle, and tours of the islands availed little until Vashon proved to be the right place. Settling in during the fall was all right but the winter was tough on everyone:- Betty's two daughters reached the heights of unenthusiasm, Don took daily beatings with travel to the mainland — as did Betty — but spring and the many different charms of island living completely seduced them. The glories of gardening on Vashon (some despairings, too); friendly and less lovable neighbors; animal life, beginning with their own dog and taking in cats, raccoons, deer and others; guests, guests and more guests; renovations, machinery — and undependable workmen; all familiar ground for almost any householder, but with a slight island twist. The girls, in spite of an abrasive adolescence, do grow up, and now they and their children return to remembered joys. The tongue is still sharp for a ludicrous situation, a personality quirk and a self-turned jibe, and the whole rounds out the picture begun with the (golden) Egg. Local as well as follower interest for this.
Pub Date: May 16, 1955
ISBN: 1888173300
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1955
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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