Acclaimed novelist Vann (Caribou Island, 2011, etc.) alternates his own adolescent fantasies about guns and school shootings with those of Steve Kazmierczak, who on Valentine's Day 2008 killed five and wounded 18 on the Northern Illinois University campus before ending his own life.
The author’s notes that his back story and that of Kazmierczak are similar. Though an outwardly well-behaved, exceptional student, Vann began an obsession with guns at age 13 after his father's suicide; the author had easy access to the weaponry his father left behind. When he read about Kazmierczak's rampage, the author felt compelled to investigate and obtained an assignment from Esquire. Gaining access to Kazmierczak's 1,500-page police file, Vann delved into the reasons for the mass murder. Those who had known Kazmierczak only during his years as a NIU student might have seen a dedicated scholar in the making, a potential professor of criminology who earned high grades and participated in campus activities. By relying on the law-enforcement files, however, Vann began to understand the demons of a manic depressive individual who had used powerful medications heavily, demonstrated suicidal tendencies for years, become alienated from family members and found it difficult to maintain friendships and romantic relationships. Although he rarely deviates from his own history and the arc of Kazmierczak's troubled life, Vann occasionally provides background on previous campus mass murderers (including the 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech) and on the ease of purchasing deadly weapons in the United States. A carefully crafted account of a descent into fatal madness.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3839-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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