Less a memoir than a handful of experiences shaped into short vignettes. Western novelist and historian Brown (Conspiracy of Knaves, 1987; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 1971, etc.) turns to his own colorful past for material in this engaging account. From his small-town Louisiana and Arkansas origins to his lengthy career as an agricultural librarian at the University of Illinois, Brown has seen most of the 20th century, his memories reflecting to a considerable degree the vast changes wrought in America during this time. Working at the age of 12 as an occasional letter-carrier for the Post Office, Brown witnessed the oil boom in southern Arkansas before moving into the heart of the Ozarks for his first newspaper job. A degree in library science from George Washington University offered few employment prospects during the Depression, so, with the onset of WW II, the author found himself a soldier, albeit one in privileged circumstances as a participant in the Army's Specialized Training Program. Forgotten, along with his unit, for a year while he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown eventually served as a librarian near Washington, until the military's combination of cold war hysteria and hypocrisy prompted him to return to civilian life. At the University of Illinois, Brown befriended a personable Pakistani who wanted to use an American education to rise above his caste back home, and, on another occasion, the author found himself in a comic situation at the Missouri Botanic Gardens; throughout his narrative, self-effacement triumphs (reference to his bestsellers and other books is limited to a four-page epilogue). Fragments of a life that are told easily and with charm; as a whole, however, the narrative is much less than the sum of its parts. (Twenty-three b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-87483-267-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: August House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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