An entertaining personal essay, short and sweet, about the cars in the life of Holroyd.
Prodigious British biographer and memoirist Holroyd (A Book of Secrets, 2011, etc.) tells of memorable automobiles in his life and in the lives of those about whom he has written.
Do not mistake this neat little book for your kid’s chapter book, though it features a large font, heavily leaded; generous margins; innocent illustrations; and just over 100 pages. It is entertainment for grown-up readers, especially of the Anglophilic sort. Holroyd has become aware that, somehow, his many books, including the biographies, have often featured automotive transportation. This text is about the automobiles of his oft-married parents and his own coming-of-age with cars. The author grew up in the congenial company of his grandparents’ permanently parked Ford, but he didn’t learn to drive until he was 30. Holroyd’s story concerns the cars he drove, the cars his biographical subjects drove and how they were all driven. The telling is as full of wit as it is fraught with harmless collisions and idiosyncratic journeys. There’s a comic ride on an emblematic double-decker. Holroyd examines the Royal Automobile Club early in the 20th century, a time when it was dubious whether the gentle members of the distaff side were suited to take the wheel. He pays tribute to the memory of his first car and recalls his years in the army as a driving instructor who had no driver’s license. Throughout is the evocative nomenclature of vehicles, unsung or famous, of the past. The cavalcade includes Vauxhalls, Biancas, Lanchesters, Rolls-Royces, Fords, Zodiacs and Zephyrs. (The author favors Honda Accords).
An entertaining personal essay, short and sweet, about the cars in the life of Holroyd.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-22657-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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