An intriguing project—the tracing of the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on a Jewish Everyboy—but very unevenly executed.
Kaufman’s (Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, 1999) grim memoir of a life defined by feelings of victimhood, traced chiefly to his mother—a survivor of the Nazi occupation of France.
Kaufman’s tone is made clear at the outset, when he immediately plunges into his early recollections of being beaten mercilessly with a wire coat hanger by his mother. His father offers no quarter; an abrasive, emotionally distant man, he doesn’t do much besides watch TV and avoid interaction with his family. Much space is devoted to the daily dangers of living in an edgy Bronx neighborhood and the various miseries of poverty. We do get to see the author grow from a soft, fat victim into a more self-assured, football-playing bruiser, but aside from the relief at seeing his beatings end, there is little pleasure in watching; he never achieves any kind of perspective on his wretchedness. The high points of his story come when he’s able to turn his pen to subjects other than anti-Semitism or his relations with his parents. An account of his first trip to the Hudson River (in which the young Kaufman is able, finally, to get a breath of fresh air) is one of a handful of magical moments scattered throughout. His bar mitzvah, conversely, was another opportunity for his parents to disappoint him (culminating in their discarding the 20 invitations they told him they’d send out)—but it provides him with yet another occasion to draw a scathing portrait of his thuggish extended family. The final few chapters are dedicated to a series of truncated essays about adult adventures—living on a kibbutz, recovering from alcoholism in San Francisco, and visiting Dachau. The memoir as a whole might have been given more balance had the author had dedicated more pages to these exploits—and fewer to his high-school football.
An intriguing project—the tracing of the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on a Jewish Everyboy—but very unevenly executed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88064-252-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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