Sharp prose and exquisitely described images characterize a series of contemplative essays.
Vivian’s (English and Creative Writing/Alma College; Another Burning Kingdom, 2011, etc.) essays embrace consistent themes of calmness, simplicity and peace. The first essay, “Ghost Hallway,” sets the tone for the collection, introducing the spirit of a middle-aged woman Vivian returns home to each evening. She mentors him, slowing him down to see beauty in the ordinary. Readers will feel her touch woven throughout the book. In most of the pieces, Vivian paints vivid images then ruminates on why he is drawn to them: a red-robed bishop shows him how to walk with grace through “the vague malaise dripping like a bad faucet at the heart of town.” As compared to the perfect smiles of most Americans, the snaggle-toothed and ramshackle grins of the Turks signal that “perfection is not possible” and that “maybe there’s something even a little sinister in the very idea of a total whitewash.” The solace of a Laundromat, surrounded by the “smells of clean laundry, in the sudden bloom of hot air from an opened dryer,” portrays the beauty of shared mundane rituals. While many of these essays are set in Michigan or Nebraska, Vivian also takes us to the hills of Turkey, the Danube River, Auschwitz and an abandoned Jewish graveyard in Poland, journeys that demonstrate how disparate cultures broaden his perspective. Beautiful essays to read and savor one at a time.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3431-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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