Courtship, travelogue, nature observations, and fish stories cover the map in this unfocused debut. Roorbach (English/Univ. of Maine at Farmington) pegs his narrative on his courtship of his wife, Juliet. He was 29 and she 20 when they met in the Hot Tin Roof disco in Martha's Vineyard. During a tumultuous eight-year relationship, they often broke up, but had their best moments together traveling—or so says the author, who conducts us from Belgium to Paris and Norway, across Canada, Martha's Vineyard, the Midwest, New Mexico, Colorado, Mt. St. Helens, and Jamaica. Along the way, several chapters on fishing (scant mention of Juliet here) are tossed in, followed by assorted nature essays. Juliet's wooing makes for some of Roorbach's more engaging writing, but also for some of his most unfortunate—``My Venus in Blue Jeans wore a paper Burger King crown and sang nonstop as we rolled past the cornfields.'' This sort of superficial treatment undercuts belief in the passion of the author's pursuit; when he discovers, for example, that Juliet has been cheating on him with regularity, he glosses over with the observation that ``my black eyes fairly dripped with tears.'' As a couple, Roorbach and Juliet strike many cute poses (``She stood naked and shivering, hugging herself, while I screwed the drilled Folger's cap onto our vessel, then sighed as I dumped hot river water over her in a perfect shower....We were clean. We were warm'') but possess all the depth of celluloid. In his chapters on nature, which could well be the nucleus of another book, Roorbach's observations of turkeys, hummingbirds, sunfish, and so forth are careful and intelligent, but uninformed by natural history or ecology. Nicely penned in places, but hamstrung by incessant meandering.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-57323-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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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