No abusive childhood, no paying of old scores, no juicy gossip, and very little revelation of anyone but the deeply decent...
A warmly old-fashioned reminiscence from the dean of the American regional mystery.
Blessed are those who expect little, said Hillerman’s mother; they are seldom disappointed. But the reason her son is seldom disappointed, as he’s at pains to point out, is that undeserved good things keep happening to him. His Oklahoma mom, whom he calls “the hero of this book,” allows him to enlist in the infantry even though he’s entitled to an exemption as the last son of a farm wife widowed the day after Pearl Harbor. He survives WWII with a Bronze Star; some of his friends deserved far more. He climbs the journalistic ladder in Santa Fe, then enjoys teaching and administrative jobs at the University of New Mexico for 15 years before leaving to become a full-time novelist. When it turns out that he and his wife Marie can have only one child, they’re able to adopt five more. His Navajo mystery A Thief of Time, published 20 years after an agent advised him to “get rid of the Indian stuff,” becomes a breakout bestseller for reasons he still can’t fathom. Hillerman’s self-made-success story does have its limitations. He’s weak on dates, selective on inclusions (surprisingly little on his childhood, though a great deal on his war service; virtually nothing on the 1980s or the wife he obviously adores, but some shrewd analysis of his own fiction, some of it tucked into an Addendum), and incapable, for better or worse, of saying an unkind word about anybody, even corporate bodies, without changing their names (though his account of trying to work the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee series for TV is priceless).
No abusive childhood, no paying of old scores, no juicy gossip, and very little revelation of anyone but the deeply decent author, who’s constantly interrupting his chatty stream of anecdotes to say one more nice thing about somebody else.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019445-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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