A lucid, sweetly sentimental testament to growing up different.
Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Page (Journalism and Music/Univ. of Southern California) reflects on his bizarre childhood and the late Asperger’s diagnosis that brought a certain measure of clarity to his memories.
Though the author wasn’t diagnosed until he was in his mid-40s, it was clear from his early childhood that something distinguished him from the other children. Asperger’s, a disorder that falls on the autism spectrum, is characterized by, among other things, a pervasive difficulty in connecting with other people, the ability to amass astonishing amounts of what some might call minutia and, if the individual is lucky, a strikingly high level of intelligence. Page was one of the lucky ones, and so the loneliness stemming from being the only two-year-old Maurice Ravel devotee in his suburban neighborhood was perhaps mitigated by having the wit to (occasionally) engage others in his passions. At age 13, he became the subject of Iris and David Hoffman’s documentary, A Day with Filmmaker Timmy Page, in which the juvenile auteur closely directs his childhood friends in The Fall of a Nation, a story of children taking over the world. Because his precocity could not be channeled in any activity that didn’t interest him, Page floundered through school, experimenting heavily with drugs, often failing courses and struggling with loneliness and depression. His memoir is also the story of a man who, having to work extra hard to make friendships, is reluctant to let them go. Throughout, Page is animated by his visceral, passionate love for music and writing.
A lucid, sweetly sentimental testament to growing up different.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52562-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
