A lengthy exploration of one family’s uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions; Frank only finds mixed success in delivering a...
A writer reflects on his celebrated aunt’s overbearing influence on his life.
Eccentric family dynamics provide the backdrop for this coming-of-age memoir from Frank, a travel writer and former Los Angeles Times book critic, who recalls the unusually close ties between his immediate family and his aunt and uncle, noted screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch. The two families lived just blocks apart from each other in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of LA. The driving power source within the family is Harriet, aka Auntie Hankie, a charismatic yet manipulative and narcissistic woman with lavish spending habits and pretentious manners. Early on in Frank’s childhood, Hankie showed great interest in his upbringing, aggressively influencing his interests and tastes and eventually becoming an all-consuming force in his life and major disrupter within the family. As he grew through his teens and early adult life, Hankie’s influence became increasingly difficult for him to bear. Throughout much of the narrative, the author documents her frequently erratic and cruel behavior in relentless detail. Though she was clearly a deeply troubled individual, the portrayal feels excessively narrow; there seems to be more to her than Frank conveys here. The author alludes to her glamorous Hollywood connections yet provides scant attention to her actual work. Though not necessarily a household name for current moviegoing audiences, her accomplishments as a screenwriter, often in collaboration with her husband, were significant, especially in such notable films as Hud (1963), starting Paul Newman, and Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field and Beau Bridges, both of which earned Academy Award nominations. The author occasionally displays a novelist’s flare in his descriptions of family members and the LA environment of the 1960s and ’70s, but readers may feel that there is more to this story than what is presented here.
A lengthy exploration of one family’s uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions; Frank only finds mixed success in delivering a compelling narrative to bolster the provocative premise.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-21012-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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