A memoir as elemental as its subject: pulsing, fetching, leaving a strong afterglow. (20 photos)
Glock debuts with a lovely, blue memoir of her maternal grandmother, a vital square peg in the poor, round hole of a hard-baked West Virginia town.
Writing with the rhythmically punctuated cadence of one semi-lost in thought as she conjures images, the author tells the story of both Aneita Jean Blair and the town of Chester, West Virginia, during the first half of the 20th century. Despite its green hills, wildflowers, and pockets of loveliness, its clean clay that drove the pottery mills, Chester had its full share of sordidness, squabbles, potter's lung, lead poisoning, backstabbing, and the grind of just making do. In this working-poor company town, Blair knew she was made of choicer stuff. She was a sparkplug who “spent at least seventy of her eighty-two years cultivating stares and making damn sure she has warranted the attention.” Dancing mattered, beauty inspired (“a woman who didn't bother to make the most of what God gave her was displaying a lack of fortitude”), baking a cake was important, but so was telling a joke and knowing how to smoke a cigarette in a bus-stop ladies’ room: style made this woman. It’s not much of a surprise that “puberty hit my grandmother like a dropped piano,” or that at 13 she attracted men like iron filings to a magnet. Her stern Scotch father was apoplectic, her mother was gentle, her brother Petey was her rock. “While her girlfriends were frantically honing in on potential mates, Aneita Jean spun the revolving door off its hinges”; again, it’s no surprise when the author warns, “sooner or later, everyone is in for a world of hurt.” Petey died young, Blair married a man who would never leave town, and her beauty paled: “it made her nastier, and it made her funnier,” qualities that drew her granddaughter to her with the same ardor as those men so many years before.
A memoir as elemental as its subject: pulsing, fetching, leaving a strong afterglow. (20 photos)Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40121-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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