In the saucy short profiles she regularly turns out for the New York Times, Witchel displays a knack for breeziness that doesn't come so naturally here: Sustaining it for the length of a book means sometimes forcing it, and this time the subject is personal—the bonds and unresolved tensions among her mother, her sister, and herself. Alex is the ``middle of the perfection sandwich''; more, more, more would please Mommy (a.k.a. Wonder Woman); less would be easier on Phoebe, ten years Alex's junior, who would then ``have only one Supreme Being to worry about'' (Mommy). Apparently, it's not so cushy being the eldest (of four), the high achiever, the responsible one—and the one who had to mother the others while Wonder Woman (impelled by childhood polio to overcompensate) got her Ph.D. and went to work when nobody else in Scarsdale did. Which is why Alex chooses, adamantly, not to have kids of her own; besides, her plate is full enough, thank you, with work, husband (finally, at 33), plus two stepsons on the weekends. Desperate to become herself, Alex is up-front about needing to Separate from ``the human Swiss Army knife'' who can do it all—yet she keeps seeking Mommy out, seducing her with article-generating junkets (to a trendy motel in the Hamptons, the deluxe Stanhope in Manhattan, the home of simpatico actress June Havoc). Although she never owns up to resentment of Mommy, other angers come close to the slick surface: at Phoebe for coexisting in the Alex/Mommy world; at the nobler-than-thou friends who martyr their tired selves to rear their little geniuses (whereas, Alex shrugs almost redeemingly, she'd probably just have a regular baby). Women who see themselves in Witchel's mirror (``pushing middle age and wearing the same clothes I took my SATs in'') may be willing to give her the benefit of the doubts raised by her presumption of an audience for all of her privileged communications.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43777-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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