An eloquent exploration of life and love by a writer with a most inquiring mind and capacious heart.
A graceful memoir of a Midwestern life, with frequent leaps to stories about the author’s granddaughter and mother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.
Memoirist and essayist Sanders (English/Indiana Univ.; The Force of Spirit, 2000, etc.) has crafted here a fairly traditional but nonetheless emotional narrative of his own coming-of-age. With an initial grudging nod to “that notorious trickster, memory,” the author tells about his Tennessee childhood, his Ohio boyhood and adolescence, his collegiate years at Brown, his graduate studies at Cambridge and the beginning of his teaching career in Indiana. We learn about the struggles of his alcoholic father and the frustrations of his mother. We learn about books the author read, his sexual awakening, his astonishing love affair with his wife, Ruth. They met at a summer high-school science camp, wrote passionately to each other for five years (their correspondence comprised thousands of letters), then married shortly before sailing to England. In Cambridge, he became active in the anti–Vietnam War movement; he writes affectingly about the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. He writes well, too, about suffering and disappointment and despair. His young wife had a lumpectomy in London (benign) and suffered a miscarriage the night before he had to defend his dissertation. His anti-war and other leftist sentiments threatened to estrange him from his family. Sanders writes candidly about how Christianity bore him along for a while, then left him. But at its core this is a love story. Sanders responds with awe to the forces of nature (his text begins and ends with a thunderstorm), and he believes that love is how humans connect to them. Permeating all is the author’s love for the natural world, and, even more intimately, for his parents, his wife, his children, his granddaughter.
An eloquent exploration of life and love by a writer with a most inquiring mind and capacious heart.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-86547-693-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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