Nostalgia is a complicated version of love, Peters reveals in this elegiac memoir, which can threaten to fade the vivid...
Recollections of place evoke ghosts, shadows and nostalgia.
Peters (English/Stern Coll., Yeshiva Univ.) grew up in Wisconsin in a quirky house designed and built by her father. Perched on a hill overlooking woods and farms, the house reappears as the central image in the author’s lyrical memoir—not just of her family and childhood, but of her lifelong struggle to reconcile “the call to take root, the call to set forth.” After leaving Wisconsin, Peters lived in New York City, bringing with her expectations gleaned from movies, TV and, most of all, books. Her search for an apartment, for example, prompted memories of reading William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes; her walks down Fifth Avenue recalled Henry James’ The American Scene. Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, William Maxwell and, most movingly, New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan all hover, as Peters considers what place meant to them and how their rendering of homes, landscapes and cityscapes shaped her responses. Living on her own in New York, she moved often: Real estate became an obsession, and each space she inhabited became a text to parse. When newly married, she and her husband found a charming apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone, where Peters quickly steeped herself in the history of the building and the neighborhood. Although her mother exhorted her to “live in the healthy present,” Peters felt drawn powerfully to the past. “Before you even walk in a room, you’re remembering it,” her husband once remarked. The author confesses that her veneration of history has led to some “back in the day” complaining, but she has come to understand that despite attachment to a home or intimacy with a beloved landscape, she is, inevitably, a transient—“a steward, not an owner” of place.
Nostalgia is a complicated version of love, Peters reveals in this elegiac memoir, which can threaten to fade the vivid present to a sepia-toned past.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-299-29620-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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