There just isn’t anything unusual enough about the author’s experiences and perceptions to make this more than a...
Poet and nonfiction author Norris (The Cloister Walk, 1996, etc.) focuses in this autobiography on her years at Bennington College in the mid-1960s and a subsequent period of maturation in New York City.
Notorious for its atmosphere of sexual promiscuity, drugs, and bohemian liberalism, Bennington seemed a bad fit for a shy girl from Honolulu whose most cherished entertainments consisted of reading and singing in the church choir. Dubbed by her college mates “the Virgin of Bennington,” Norris spent four years in self-imposed isolation, composing verse largely out of a need for “protective coloration” in a world that seemed to have little place for her. Poetry was a defense mechanism against the intrusion of coarse reality, claims Norris, who had her first sexual experience with another girl and later became the lover of a married professor. Moving to New York after graduation, she took a job at the Academy of American Poets, performing menial secretarial tasks but benefiting from the opportunity to attend poetry readings and meet stars of the literary demimonde. Persistently describing herself as too bashful to venture out to a Manhattan grocery store, in the same breath the author portrays all-night binges in the bars and poets’ lofts she frequented, sometimes to the detriment of her daytime responsibilities. More interesting than her panorama of New York’s unbridled bohemian lifestyle is Norris’s tribute to mentor and friend Betty Kray, executive director of the AAP. Committed to helping struggling writers through grants and awards, Kray nourished many native talents while also promoting foreign celebrities. Convinced of Kray’s decisive role in her own creative development, Norris mulls over their friendship and Betty’s selfless devotion to the verbal art.
There just isn’t anything unusual enough about the author’s experiences and perceptions to make this more than a near-stereotypical tale of a provincial American emerging from a sheltered, small-town environment to confront the dangers and temptations of a big metropolis.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-179-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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