A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.
A candid, personal look at the geography of memory.
In this warmhearted memoir of a retiree’s tour of his old haunts, Junker tries to do for 1950s Brooklyn what James Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: rebuild a city, from memory. For readers looking for more accessible, albeit less remarkable, prose than Joyce’s, Junker’s tale is quite appealing, as he reconstructs Brooklyn in a specific place and time. The author spends a single winter day in Brooklyn walking the streets that defined his childhood, visiting the homes, churches and baseball fields where much of his story played out. Though not entirely idyllic–for example, the author’s German father suffers the indignities of discrimination after the war and dies relatively young–on the whole, the story will engage readers with animated recollections of a boisterous Italian neighborhood. Constructing the narrative around specific places like Coney Island, Kings Highway and Prospect Park, the author firmly ties each to the people in his life, remembering his rabble-rousing friends and ribald uncles with equal parts warmth and reserve. Junker reflects Brooklyn through the prism of his childhood, but he makes the archeology of the place vibrant and meaningful, even for readers who have never set foot in the New York borough. It’s the details that make it delicious, from recollections of the Brooklyn Dodgers that tap the country’s collective love of the underdog, to the sing-song cacophony of immigrant voices living the American dream. The author fittingly thanks Pete Hamill for inspiration–Junker infuses his childhood stomping grounds with the same affection with which Hamill writes about Manhattan.
A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-36846-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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