A poignant and forthright tale of a rugged journey by an extraordinarily gifted writer—who may be borrowing from her...
A memoir that floats like a sad song, with its themes the effervescence of champagne and the flatness of the morning after.
Cheever (A Woman’s Life, 1994) has written about her life and her family’s before, notably in Home Before Dark, her memoir of her father, John. This book changes the angle of the mirror, focusing on the role of alcohol in her growing up, her affairs and marriages, the birth of her two children, and her work. Drinking was her heritage: The ship on which her ancestors came to the New World carried “three times as much beer as water, along with ten thousand gallons of wine.” Her grandmother taught her how to mix martinis when she was six years old. In her family’s suburban household, drinks were taken before, during, and after dinner and at Sunday brunch. In college, and later in the Deep South during the civil rights summers of 1965 and 1966, she found herself a part of “a bunch of us kids from Ivy League colleges . . . [who] went to parties and drank a lot. . . . “ Cheever, now fiftysomething, rafted through life on a river of alcohol; her pain was dulled, but so were her judgment and memory. She accompanied her father to AA meetings, yet even though the stories told sometimes paralleled hers, there was always a detail “too bizarre” to let her label herself as an alcoholic. Her two children finally moved her to stop drinking, and a new belief in God allowed her to succeed. “They say that drinking is a low-level search for God,” Cheever avers; now new—or restored—faith in God has reportedly moved her to another level.
A poignant and forthright tale of a rugged journey by an extraordinarily gifted writer—who may be borrowing from her father’s story to define her own life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-80432-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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