Readers uncomfortable with the author’s message may wish that he did not repeat it so often, and those expecting a son’s...
One man’s journey into his family’s past and a sociologist’s meditation on white America’s history of greed and genocide.
When Johnson (The First Thing and the Last, 2010, etc.) asked his dying father where he wished his ashes to be placed, the response that it made no difference to him set the author on a journey to the Midwest to learn about his father and his Norwegian forefathers. His journal of that solo trip, often an hour-by-hour record of staying in bleak hotels and driving through disappearing towns, is steeped in his shame and grief for the injustice committed by white settlers who destroyed or exiled the people that occupied the land they wanted and claimed as their own. The kind relatives and friendly people he meets along the way seem oblivious to the history that torments Johnson, shrugging it off as a war over land that their side won. Finding the cemetery where his great-grandfather was buried, he secretly dug a hole for his father’s ashes, doing, as he writes, “what I could with what I was given.” It was not a satisfactory moment. What it means to be white, what it means to be American, and what it means to be from a place and to belong to it are questions that Johnson raises throughout the book. He is painfully aware that as a descendant of those who took the land from others, dispossessing and displacing them, he is today the beneficiary of acts he did not perform. “It has been my destiny to go down into the cellars of this nation’s history and then return,” he writes. “In doing that, I have had to become familiar with dark nights of the soul, to grow accustomed to the belly of the whale.”
Readers uncomfortable with the author’s message may wish that he did not repeat it so often, and those expecting a son’s gentle memoir will be in for a surprise. This is a difficult journey.Pub Date: June 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4399-1245-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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