A leisurely stroll with a knowledgeable but unpretentious companion through some very interesting aisles.
A proud and unrepentant biblio-addict explains how he got that way—and how books and bookstores have evolved, as well.
Reading this gentle memoir/history is itself a bit like browsing in a friendly bookshop. Buzbee, who began his long tenure in the book business as a teenaged clerk at a now-defunct shop called the Upstart Crow, and who has subsequently published fiction (Fliegelman’s Desire, 1990, not reviewed), is an amiable guide. The author came from a family with only mild interest in books (Reader’s Digest Condensed Books lined some of the shelves), and it was not until he read The Grapes of Wrath in high school that his addiction began. The early pages are principally memoir, but about halfway through, Buzbee begins to interweave lengthy sections on the history of books and bookselling. He rehearses the story of the great library at Alexandria, the invention and modifications of the printing press, the rise of the bookshop and its frequent neighbor, the coffeehouse. (We learn that books used to be displayed horizontally, not vertically, on shelves.) The author teaches us, as well, about the emergence of the superstore (both B. Dalton and Waldenbooks arrived in 1969), the meaning of the ISBN, the importance of used-book dealers, the rise of online bookselling. He acknowledges that Amazon, et al., have wounded the bricks-and-mortar stores, but he does not foresee a time when there are no traditional shops. Nor does he think e-books or print-on-demand texts will ever replace the familiar paperback. Buzbee offers a strong chapter in praise of free-speech-loving booksellers, with special attention to the Salman Rushdie case and the publication of Ulysses. He fires some shots at the Patriot Act and takes us on a tour of his favorite shops, among them Square Books in Oxford, Miss., and City Lights in San Francisco.
A leisurely stroll with a knowledgeable but unpretentious companion through some very interesting aisles.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55597-450-3
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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