As a study of the relationship between literature and life, the book is intriguing, but the critical literary perspective...
The debut memoir about the formative years of a New York intellectual who tells his story out of "a more-than-ordinary fear of reliving [his] past elsewhere.”
The only son of a medical scientist and a concert pianist, literary critic and n+1 founder Roth grew up in an Upper-West-Side atmosphere where reciting the classics and learning about biology with his father were the norm. Just as he was about to enter high school, he discovered that his father, who claimed to have contracted HIV through laboratory exposure many years before, was dying of AIDS. The family home soon became a suffocating space of denial where "the important thing was to behave as though nothing were wrong.” At the same time, Roth's father developed a morbid interest both in the scientific literature about HIV-AIDS and in sharing the information dispassionately with his son. The author made halfhearted attempts to escape by attending Oberlin College, but he returned to New York on pain of being cut from his father's will. After his father's death, Roth traveled to Paris, ostensibly to study with Jacques Derrida, but more to find release from the ghost of his father. Upon his return, his father's sister presented him with a manuscript in which she alluded to her brother's homosexuality. Her claims caused Roth to begin an investigation of his father's life through the novels that the elder Roth had given him. Eventually, he uncovered the truths his father could not articulate.
As a study of the relationship between literature and life, the book is intriguing, but the critical literary perspective Roth brings to the subject at times translates as a lack of emotional engagement.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-21028-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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