Taylor's third volume of Irish reminiscences (Quench the Lamp, 1991; To School Through the Fields, 1990) continues in a sunny vein as it evokes the history, landscape, and sometimes dotty citizenry of tiny 1960's Innishannon, where the author raised five kids, opened a guest house, and manned the local post office and grocery store. When Taylor, then an energetic young switchboard operator in Brandon, married the orphaned nephew of a pair of shopkeepers and moved with him to his hometown of Innishannon in County Cork, the locals greeted the bride with a joke and a smile but remarked among themselves that she might turn out to be a tad too flighty for village life. Set on the wooded banks of the Brandon River, Innishannon had once served the grand estates of wealthy British and Irish families, but 20th-century uprisings and industrialization had rendered it a small, sleepy hamlet whose residents knew every detail of each others' lives. To the villagers' relief, Alice proved more dependable than she at first seemed—helping out in the shop until she and her husband were able to turn a large house on the main street into a successful inn; raising four sons and a daughter; tending to the elderly; dabbling in the arts; and, always, noting down the whimsical tales told in the shop, the post office, and the church by Innishannon's hard- working carpenters, priests, grandmothers, and children. The result is a portrait of a placid, charming, and remarkably isolated Irish town—certainly a different Ireland than the war-torn land farther north. Sentimental but entertainingly so: the story of a village well kept and a life well lived.
Pub Date: March 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08919-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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