A heavily detailed and highly readable account of the author's lineage.
Seasoned journalist Whitaker reports the history of his parents' lives. Now managing editor of CNN Worldwide, the former NBC Washington bureau chief and former editor of Newsweek, the author decided, one year to the hour after his father's death, to write this book. The structure is largely chronological, beginning with his parents' meeting at Swarthmore in the mid ’50s, when his father, Syl, was one of the only black students and his white mother, Jeanne, taught French. Despite Syl's adultery, they were married for six years and had two sons, Mark and his younger brother, Paul, until Syl asked for a divorce. An estimable expert on Nigeria, Syl was asked to start Princeton's first African-American Studies program, though he was eventually fired because of his drinking. In and out of his sons' lives, often failing to pay child support, Syl weathered numerous trips to rehab, and his alcoholism derailed what might have been a stellar career. He never stayed at any college for too long, due in no small part to the problems that resulted from his womanizing. As a boy, Whitaker struggled to forgive his absences. His anger, manifested itself as compulsive eating, anorexia and long periods of being out of touch with his father. The author chronicles how he made peace with his father, despite his many failings, and how he built for a fulfilling marriage and career. It's difficult to follow the many names and threads, especially in the first half, but the writing comes across as honest and wholly engaging. A fascinating personal treatise on racial identity and complicated father-son dynamics.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2754-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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