A “collaboration” between historian White (Univ. of Washington) and his mother, Sara, this blends formal historical research and the oral tradition. The bare bones of White’s narrative follow the family’s travails via the stories Sara and others remember being told as children, plus those they’ve lived through and generated themselves. Oral recollections, though, often fail to jive among the tellers, much less with the historical record. Therein lies the richness of this somewhat sluggishly told saga. Family members don’t even agree as to why Sara Walsh left Countty Kerrey, Ireland, in 1936 at the age of 16 to join her father and other relatives on Chicago’s South Side. She claims that she didn’t want to leave, though she hated the work on the family’s small farm, as well as working as a kind of indentured servant since the age of 11. Her father, a streetcar repairman in Chicago, had left Ireland years earlier for vague reasons of his own. Sara’s story of the train ride from New York to Chicago is a classic. With nothing to eat or drink and with no idea how to use the bathroom, she was “more absorbed in her hungers and discomforts than in America unfolding past the windows.” Things were strained for the extended family living on South Mozart Street. During the war Sara worked at Chicago Municipal Airport. On a junket to New Orleans she met her future husband, Harry White, a cum laude graduate of Harvard. Their marriage led to bitter clashes between her Irish Catholic relatives and his Jewish family. White hints that his bad memories of his father and his maternal grandmother’s refusal to speak ill of him was “the cruelest work in the book,” but he lets it go: “She insists on her memory.” A story so typical in so many ways profits from White’s personal conflict over the desire to trust familial recollection and the historian’s insistence on fact. (4 b&w photos; 2 maps)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8090-8071-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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