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THIN ICE

COMING OF AGE IN CANADA

New Yorker humorist McCall (Zany Afternoons, not reviewed) effectively cauterizes his own dysfunctional family with his trademark red-hot, rapier wit. In short chapters that give a madcap serial reconstruction of a hardscrabble, emotionally deprived childhood in Simcoe, Ontario, circa 1945 (and, later, Toronto and Windsor), McCall, son of an absentee father and alcoholic mother who conveyed the impression that kids had ruined their lives, evokes a young Canadian's sense of inferiority to his US peers in the glory years of WW II and the postwar boom. Lacking its own Empire State Building, Hoover Dam, or Golden Gate Bridge, explains McCall, ``Canada declined to soar in any way.'' Canadian underachievement, combined with McCall's low family self-image, provides ample fuel for his rabid drollery: ``A rotten start,'' he muses, ``I don't know where I'd be today without it.'' Drawing at the refuge of his bedroom desk, McCall exercised a dawning artistic consciousness fed by comics, cartoons, and magazine illustrations, and reveled in the grand entertainment of the war, a ``triple header'' of news and propaganda streaming from Ottowa, Washington, and London; in news about ``flash'' American fighter planes; and in his own noble sacrifices on the home front, including the use of Soya Spread (a ghoulish synthetic peanut butter substitute). He loses momentum in reviewing his gradual departure from the wondrously twisted family nest to spend the mid-'50s as a failed commercial illustrator for Detroit—a waste, he says, but probably inevitable; it was a safe place to lie low while sorting things out and waiting for the master plan of his career to be revealed. Ultimately, a passion for automobiles led to a succession of editorial jobs with the Canadian car rags, and- -presto!—to this keen subversive's inevitable discovery of a writerly vocation that fits like a glove. McCall is always amusing, but his survivalist comic viewpoint is instructive, too, as a model for overcoming truly miserable circumstances.

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-679-44847-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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