A little of the incessant be-here-now grooviness can go a long way, though readers inclined to New Age sensibilities will...
Coherence takes a backseat to exuberant, purplish prose in this sprawling saga of a family’s life in Mexico and the US, sequel to Rain of Gold (1991).
Choosing to explain those eponymous senses only in an afterword, Villaseñor writes, “I deliberately didn’t list them anywhere in the text, because if I had, then people wouldn’t have experienced the book.” We’re enslaved, he continues, by the first five senses, “the perfect trap to keep us going around in circles inside of our brain computer” instead of the apparently preferable “heart and soul computers,” sites of senses six through nine. (Ten through thirteen seem to reside in outer space, along with the author’s reasoning.) There’s plenty of heart and soul but perhaps too little brain in Villaseñor’s overstuffed, undisciplined narrative, which centers on the alternately wacky, dreamy, and difficult lives of his parents, grandparents, and cousins, a melting-pot clan of Indians and Europeans who combined to form “a United Force from two different WORLDS!” Many of the countless anecdotes are little more than shaggy-dog stories, although others carry more weight: the saga of his uncle Domingo, who finally found a long-sought gold mine after many misadventures, then proceeded to drink the proceeds; the end-of-days realization by Villaseñor’s mother that she had never told her husband she loved him. The author’s passion and talent for storytelling are evident throughout, as are his radiant good humor and devotion to the wisdom of black-clad crones who pop up from time to time in these pages to bliss out over the joys of eating avocado-slathered corn tortillas and watching “silky-thin clouds out over the sea where the Father Sun, the Right Eye of the Almighty, was setting.”
A little of the incessant be-here-now grooviness can go a long way, though readers inclined to New Age sensibilities will find the ever-enthusiastic Villaseñor a pleasant and engaging companion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621077-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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