Sparely written, often casual, but powerful.
From award-winning journalist Powers, a debut memoir considering a youth lost to a firearms accident.
Misadventures involving “loaded guns, unsupervised, rambunctious teenage boys” still occur today, yet as related here his story is redolent of chaotic mid-1980s Brooklyn, scene of the author’s childhood. Powers’s hard-working mother, a nurse and Army reservist, kept several handguns at home, not realizing that her son liked taking them out to impress his friends. One day in 1988, unaware that her .38 revolver was loaded, 14-year-old Kemp shot his best friend Henry in the face, killing him. “Beyond all reason,” Henry’s parents forgave him and declined to press charges; despite the district attorney’s anger, he was sentenced to only a year of counseling. Understandably, the incident has haunted Powers ever since. But The Shooting is also a subdued evocation of a vanished Brooklyn, post-disco but pre-gentrification, a place of temptations and urban dangers epitomized by street gangs and vigilante Bernie Goetz. The author and his peers were acquainted with vandalism and random assaults, but they also enjoyed the street culture of slot cars, comic books, early rap, video games, and break dancing. Enrolled in a “magnet school” gifted program, Powers enjoyed friendships across racial boundaries, but tensions increased following a black youth’s death following a mob assault in Queens. He recalls “Howard Beach” as the hostile rallying cry of Brooklyn’s Italian-Americans against the perceived invasion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, and his youthful self perfectly perceived the uneasy lure of weapons: “A gun alleviated the need to roll ten or twenty people deep when venturing out at night.” Powers became an aggressive, success-obsessed journalist with a self-destructive streak, which he now recognizes as a labyrinthine atonement for his crime. “Even at fourteen years old, Henry . . . was walking a righteous path. For a while, at least, so was I.” He concludes by noting that had the shooting occurred today he’d be handed a mandatory minimum sentence.
Sparely written, often casual, but powerful.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56858-320-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
