Still, enough of Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we’ve come to associate with the seven...
Mercury astronaut turned thriller-writer Carpenter (The Steel Albatross, 1990) and his daughter put on the dampeners as they tell his life story thus far.
It’s not their subdued tone, though, that robs this autobiography of its potential vitality. That is accomplished by using the third person, which establishes too great a distance between the reader and Carpenter, pulling the rug out from under the immediacy the story begs for—an immediacy that it gets only for the few hours when Carpenter is in his Aurora 7 orbiting Earth: he then takes control of the story much as he did his capsule when the fuel ran out due to equipment malfunction. Carpenter spent his early years in the company of his grandparents, his mother away for long stretches of time in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, his father having deserted the family. Carpenter did keep in touch with his father through letters, which are reproduced here, allowing readers into the head of the young man. As a military test plot at Patuxent, he became a prime candidate for the Mercury Program. Description of the screening and selection process for that adventure, its endless “psychophysiological nit-picking,” hews closely to Tom Wolfe’s handling of it in The Right Stuff, though these authors retune the characterizations (“John Glenn was more ambitious, more talented, funnier, and more charismatic than the humorless Calvinist of The Right Stuff”). The space flight is the centerpiece, a truly dangerous and punishing mission (“I was trained to avoid any active intellectual comprehension of disaster,” he notes as his spacecraft started to fail him). His work for SeaLab after the Mercury Program gets skimmed over. And why mention that he’s had three divorces without then delving at least a bit into that part of the life?
Still, enough of Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we’ve come to associate with the seven Mercury astronauts. (16 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100467-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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