A sobering and obsessive but richly imaged family/self- portrait from Kittredge (We Are Not in This Together, 1984), scion of prominent tamers of the southeastern Oregon wilderness, who treats his legacy as more of a curse than a source of pride. From the iron-willed Kittredge patriarch, whose single-minded philosophy was to pour everything into the ranch he created, to his dissolute grandchildren who wanted nothing more than to sell it off and live on the proceeds, the author looks sharply at family personalities and disappointments and the tensions within and between generations. His father and grandfather developed a mutual hatred over differing opinions regarding the ranch, and the friction colored relations between his parents—as well as his own sense of identity in childhood. Forced early on to learn the ways of a cowhand, Kittredge opted instead for the tamer rigors of haying, thereby coming into his own in ranch routines as a field hand. The confusion of adolescence, buffeted by family dynamics, gave rise to a lack of fulfillment, resulting in a failed marriage and years of existential angst fueled by endless alcoholic binges until, from desperation and desire, writing was tapped as a likely career—a choice facilitated by the decision to sell the ranch in the mid-1960's. Oregon and ranching became Kittredge's past, and Montana and teaching his future, in which the necessary space and distance could be found to put a troubled life into perspective. Acutely perceptive regarding the relationship of a family to the land, but overly confessional and self-flagellating, with exquisite longings and a delicate vision heavily steeped in sentimentality.
Pub Date: June 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41166-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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