An agreeable text of easygoing humor that reads like it was written down in a spiral-bound notebook.
A pastor recalls his idyllic youth in America’s heartland.
As Quaker Rev. Gulley (Porch Talk: Stories of Decency, Common Sense, and Other Endangered Species, 2007, etc.) admits, his “is not a careful narrative” of the good old days in a small town down the road a bit from Indianapolis. Danville was evidently a sister village to that depicted in Thornton Wilder’s elegiac Our Town. The Hoosier hamlet also boasted its native “Doc Gibbs.” Corn, cattle and laboratory mice were its chief products. In the style of the late Jean Shepherd, though Gulley is a tad more mannerly, the memoir speaks of bicycles, dogs, an outhouse or two, Halloween mischief, the local funeral parlor and the 4-H Club carnival. His hometown was populated with pals like Suds and Peanuts, relations like Cousin Pooner and sister Chick, assorted citizens like Officer Charley and Orville the grocer. Dad was a gregarious sort and a great bug-spray salesman. Gulley, better known as “Norm and Gloria’s boy,” mowed lawns for Quaker widows, waxed Dad’s car, played pranks, daydreamed about teacher Huddleston and beheld, in awe, the girls of Danville. During those summers past, the latter-day Little Rascals grew into teens with the attendant difficulties of pubescent celibacy. In characteristically candid terms, the author speaks of the lads’ concerns about their “winkies.” He was the bespectacled skinny kid with the big ears, and this regular, everyday boy presents a regular, everyday bucolic confection.
An agreeable text of easygoing humor that reads like it was written down in a spiral-bound notebook.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-073659-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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