A toast to Art, who survived serious scrapes with the law, as well as women in tight jeans and pouffed hair, and lived to...
An up-by-his-bootstraps San Jose businessman reflects on his rough-and-tumble California life in the ’60s.
Rodriguez is one tough old bird. He has cranked out a series of books (East Side Dreams, 1999; Forgotten Memories, 2002) after teaching himself to read and write and to work with proper grammar. Sure, his tale of hot-blooded youth has some rough edges and splinters, but he has placed profanity and sex outside the scope of his work, so even youngsters are welcome. Indeed, high-schoolers struggling with reading might find Rodriguez far more engaging than some of the remedial material on the school’s shelves. And those who lived through those roller-coaster years will enjoy the sobering journey back to the era when fights were “rumbles,” few people played with guns (fists were the primary weapons), drugs were an exotic Asian novelty, beer was the most popular intoxicant and gasoline cost 24 cents per gallon. It’s not literature, but Rodriguez’s writing is accessible and painstakingly crafted, and he has the committed storyteller’s knack for details–including a lively description of the layout of a drive-in movie theater. Moreover, it’s apparent that success hasn’t changed him–he remains true to his roots throughout, and presents an admirable tale of genuine Horatio Alger Americana.
A toast to Art, who survived serious scrapes with the law, as well as women in tight jeans and pouffed hair, and lived to entertain us with his tales.Pub Date: June 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-967-1555-4-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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