Sensibly wrought, without lyrical affectation.
A New England poet and teacher affectingly recalls finding his voice amid a rural New Hampshire childhood deeply scarred by divorce and discipline.
McNair (Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems, 2010, etc.) was born in 1941 to a young Missouri couple who migrated to find work in New Hampshire; soon after his father abandoned the young family, now with three young sons. In 1952, his mother remarried a French Canadian with horticulture aspirations. The children worked on a small West Claremont farm, observing their parents’ sense of strict discipline and scrimping and saving. After the novelty wore off, the three boys came to view their farm life as “an endless grind,” and the author especially was perceived as spacey and ill-focused, called a “hammerhead” and frequently whipped for infractions. McNair’s stepfather aimed to inculcate in the boys a sense of the meaning of work, yet the excessive punishments—e.g., being grounded for the summer for being late one evening walking a girl home—made the author only want to plot continually to run away from home. He did so after high-school graduation, making his way from one menial job to the next, all the while planning ways to progress in school. Steeped in the work of Cummings, Eliot and Dos Passos, he wanted to be a writer. Yet his big chance to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt learning poetry at the feet of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate in the early 1960s was derailed when he fell for a divorcée with two children. For readers, who will root for the author’s young persona, his decision to hunker down and pay the bills marks a denouement that is stunning and bitter; after about 80 pages, the details of parental grief predominate. McNair went on to various degrees and teaching accomplishments, yet his memoir from then on tellingly dwells more on his family than on his own work.
Sensibly wrought, without lyrical affectation.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-88748-557-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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
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