At a remove, Ferguson is downright smart and entertaining; in the thick of it, you feel his pain.
The college-admissions process scrubs Weekly Standard senior editor Ferguson (Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America, 2007, etc.) like a Brillo pad in this droll, tart chronicle of his son’s progress to Big State U.
The letters started to arrive when Ferguson’s son was a junior in high school, glossy solicitations from colleges they didn’t even know existed. Investigating, the author was in for a rude surprise. While he had let his son fritter away his childhood being a kid, others had been prepping their children for college since kindergarten. Woefully behind the curve—one college prepper referred to him as a “baaaaaaad daaaaaad”—Ferguson quickly joined the ranks of the college-obsessed. This is well-worn territory, but the author, though neurotic, also proves affable, wry, modest and quite funny. Early on in the process, he realized that for every piece of good advice—and there is plenty—there is an equal and opposite piece of advice. During his investigation, he encountered the college rankings, the SAT, guidebooks and the grind of financial-aid forms (“they’ve made it inconvenient for me to get free money”). He took the SAT and was dismayed to find that his math score was “low enough to take your breath away…a level somewhere below ‘lobotomy patient’ but above ‘Phillies fan.’ ” Ferguson also confronted the application form, a harmless questionnaire wrapped around an explosive device—the personal essay, in which, according to samples tendered by experts, “every sentence contained a little stink bomb of braggadocio.” Throughout, the author astutely balances the wretched aspects of the process (“the latest admissions trend in American higher education is affirmative action for white men”) with pathos.
At a remove, Ferguson is downright smart and entertaining; in the thick of it, you feel his pain.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0121-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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