Charmingly idiosyncratic and peripatetic.
A veteran author of novels, poetry and essays examines her deep ambivalence about the value of travel—and connects it to the publication of her most recent novel (The Writing on the Wall, 2005).
Schwartz’s account begins in confusion in the early morning darkness in a hotel on the Greek island of Naxos. It ends with a sort of epiphany—a way to complete a story begun decades ago as a seventh grader, which became a novel about twins that she had returned to but abandoned on earlier occasions. In between, Schwartz moves about like a nervous traveler with an uncertain but engaging itinerary. So swiftly and gracefully do her paragraphs flow into one another that we are unbothered by jumping around to Jamaica, Rome, St. Louis, the Catskills, Hawaii and a fancy Boston hotel room plagued by a mouse. Schwartz says she’s never liked to travel—despite her girlhood fantasies about upscale hotels with alacritous bellhops—because she doesn’t like to feel ignorant, fearful or disrupted; she prefers familiar surroundings and the voyages in her mind. She confesses that she is often bored by the travel accounts of others, and suspects she’s not alone. (In some places she forgets this principle with her own overlong anecdotes.) Throughout she alludes to—and quotes generously from—the Tao te Ching and the travel writings of Italo Calvino, W.G. Sebald, Frigyes Karinthy and many others. She writes affectingly about the loss of her father, and wonders if he were somehow related to look-alike Ariel Sharon. She recalls impecunious grad-school days and—most alarmingly—seeing a severed human hand in the Jamaican surf. Looming over all…9/11.
Charmingly idiosyncratic and peripatetic.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-428-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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