The continuing autobiographical chronicles of an Irish woman at midlife. Taylor's fourth volume of reminiscences (The Village, 1993; etc.) continues her series of sketches on life in a small village near Cork. With most of her children grown or in their teens, the stories now focus on Taylor herself. Each sketch is self-contained, lending a disjointed quality to the book. Tales vary from the slapstick (as she details the reburial of a stolen skull) to the sentimental (as she recounts a visit with a friend whose son has Down's syndrome). She's most enjoyable when writing about her family, whether it's a trip with her Doc Martenwearing niece to buy suitable wedding attire or her Aunt Mary's troublesome visits. The volume opens with a childhood memory of her grandmother's corset: ``as Nanna's corset hit the leg of the iron bed with a clatter of bone and steel, I wondered if she had ever been young.'' Her language fares better in prose than in the short poems interspersed between some of the chapters, which lack any edge at all. In the midst of Taylor's more humorous anecdotes, are a few revealing her individual quest for spirituality. A devout Catholic, she remains open to widening her religious practice, whether this involves going on an arduous retreat or to a prayer meeting. Readers may be drawn to Taylor because of her easy narrative and the glimpse she offers of Ireland. Indeed, Taylor's greatest strength is her sense of place. As she writes of her father's death, it is clear that knowing he was the seventh generation of her family to live and farm his land is of great comfort. It is common for Irish-Americans to idealize Ireland. However, as Taylor's writing illustrates, the land can indeed offer much real wisdom. Quiet, entertaining tales of special interest to readers nostalgic for a slice of Irish life.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11763-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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