The author concludes that “Being an engineer is in fact a lot like being a paperboy,” and by the end, we’re convinced as...
An engineer (Civil Engineering and History/Duke) who has written about pencils, bridges, and other useful things casts a fond—and analytical—look back at his own 1950s youth and once again discovers mystery and magnificence in the mundane.
Petroski (The Book on the Bookshelf, 1999, etc.) begins near his 12th birthday, when he received what he wanted most: a Schwinn. It arrived unassembled, and Petroski’s father (manually challenged) wisely permitted his more skillful son to put it together. The Schwinn would soon carry young Petroski around Queens on a paper route that he kept for the better part of two-and-a-half years—approximately the timeframe for this marvelous memoir. With his fascination for the pragmatic and historical, Petroski lets few things escape his analysis. He relates some of the history of Queens, the system of numbering houses there, the method for adjusting bicycle spokes, the rules of penny-pitching, the history of the Long Island Press (the paper he delivered), the economics of newspaper-delivery, the history of the bicycle, the differences between American Flyer and Lionel trains, the effects of consuming two aspirin with warm Pepsi, the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn—and so much more. At one point he confesses, “The closer I looked at things, the more complicated they became.” Lucky for us. Petroski pauses to ponder complications and then explain them in a prose so transparent that at times we are barely aware we are reading. Among the treasures: a terrific description of how he folded a newspaper to keep it from flying apart as it soared from his hand to the subscriber’s porch; and a horrifying account of a brutal algebra teacher’s determination (and failure) to break Petroski’s spirit.
The author concludes that “Being an engineer is in fact a lot like being a paperboy,” and by the end, we’re convinced as well that no metaphor for life is more apt than a paper route. (30 b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: April 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41353-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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