Slick, self-analytical memoirs of a young man who, at considerable pain to his adoptive parents, is driven to find the mother who gave him up at birth. Although Green says that until he was 21 he never thought about his birth mother, he describes himself as a man whose rejection at birth not only shaped his unsavory relations with women but drove him to become a high achiever—class covaledictorian, first-round draft choice of the Atlanta Falcons, published author (The Dark Side of the Game, 1996, etc.), lawyer, and television sportscaster. Epiphany came when he learned that his girlfriend's mother, to whom he was especially close, had once given up a child for adoption. For the next seven years he tried to locate his own mother, and through a combination of persistence, luck, a willingness to trade on his reputation as a football star, and a readiness to ask favors, he finally succeeded. Despite his subject matter, Green's writing packs little emotional punch, and scenes that ought to pull heartstrings fall flat. While achievement and respectability are high priorities for Green, such is apparently not the case with his younger adopted brother, whose erratic job history and disturbing behavior serve as a kind of counterpoint to the author's own success. Green's story thus contains a double warning for adoptive parents: If nature wins out over nurture, you might find yourself raising a loser who will disappoint you; on the other hand, you might raise a winner whose single-minded pursuit of his roots will hurt you. Happily, Green's late grasp of what parenting is all about leads to the beginnings of a reconciliation with his adoptive parents. A book that has the elements of an engaging human drama but, clogged as it is with amateur psychologizing, fails to stir. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-039217-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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