The recent multitude of memoirists should take a page from Fox: Less really can be more.
Traveling in Eastern Europe just after the end of World War II, a young journalist sees destruction, desolation and despair, hears horrible stories, thinks about her own life, has an epiphany.
Fox’s first memoir (Borrowed Finery, 2001) recalled her childhood and youth. Here, in a style most spare, even austere, Fox records her struggles to begin a career and offers her insights about topics ranging from communism to fascism to race. She begins and ends in New York City, where she has spent most of her life, and tells us about the small miracles of the place—chance encounters with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, an outing with Paul Robeson. Then she offers a snippet about her waitressing days in the Catskills to raise money for her 1946 trip abroad. In England, she works for a bit as a model, then finds employment with a small news service that sends her across the Channel to find post-war stories. In London, she enjoys Olivier in Lear and sees an inebriated Winston Churchill. She is shocked by the state of post-war Paris (“I sensed the tracks of the wolf,” she says). Later, she goes to Prague, then Warsaw during its fierce winter. She hears that when the snow melts, the bodies will begin to emerge. In the Tatra Mountains, she meets desperate children whose parents were murdered by Nazis. In Spain, she sees how fascism affects ordinary people and muses that the term political life “is so abstract until a cane is laid across one’s back.” Back in New York, now a tutor of troubled youth, she invites her charges one night to look through a powerful telescope. Her students are strangely silent afterwards, and Fox realizes how humbling it is to see beyond oneself.
The recent multitude of memoirists should take a page from Fox: Less really can be more.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7806-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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