A roguishly charming memoir.
Debut memoirist Righten describes his working-class childhood and erstwhile young adulthood amid a motley crew of relatives and friends in Ireland and England.
Righten’s memoir will remind readers of a drunken evening in a pub spent listening to tales of a sordid and colorful life. He takes turns as a rollicking fighter, pub denizen and gambler before, eventually, becoming a humanitarian. With a sly, ironic voice, Righten avoids sentimentalizing his life by undercutting every harsh observation with humor; ever the “Fenian bastard,” Righten has a gift for rendering the eccentricities of his friends and relatives in a comedic way. Wacky travel anecdotes and scenes of brawls, workplace shenanigans, and football matches gone awry are lively and engrossing. However, this is not a memoir for the straight-laced, politically correct or fainthearted: Massive quantities of alcohol are consumed, many teeth are knocked out, and sarcasm is in generous supply. Righten’s life philosophy, represented in the title, plays a large part in the narrative. He believes that even the most unlikely of rogues has a moral compass and is capable of unexpected acts of kindness. Of course, the author employs a uniquely flexible definition of good, which may include violence against cheating husbands and abusive fathers. But readers will find it difficult to disagree with the thrust of Righten’s arguments in the second half of this memoir, which focuses on the author’s career as a humanitarian worker in Bosnia and Latin America. His run-in with a sociopathic mercenary is particularly chilling, as are his descriptions of delivering medicine to hospitals filled with traumatized, needy children during the Bosnian War. Righten’s own near-death experiences will convince readers that the author is one of the benevolent scoundrels he so admires.
A roguishly charming memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467889476
Page Count: 472
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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