An often compelling life story that would have benefited from some streamlining.
An attorney describes moments of triumph and tragedy that have shaped his life.
Ewell’s memoir begins on a Saturday morning in April 1992—the day that his oldest brother, Dale, his sister-in-law, and niece were all laid to rest in a Fresno cemetery. They’d all been shot and killed on Easter Sunday, and Ewell’s nephew was responsible for their deaths. Throughout this remembrance, the strong influence that Dale had on the author throughout his life is palpable. Ewell tells of his beginnings on his family’s farm, not far from Cleveland, and is candid in his descriptions of both the serenity and harshness of rural life: “While there was beauty and peacefulness on the farm, there was ever-present suffering as well….Death was everywhere: the shooting of dogs by Dad if they chased sheep, the trapping and killing of animals for their fur that I participated in.” Later chapters cover his time in law school, starting in 1963, in the burgeoning countercultural mecca of San Francisco as well as his budding legal career, his first marriage and family life, eventual divorce, and remarriage in Fresno. Along the way, the author enters Republican politics, hobnobs with celebrity athletes, such as Michael Jordan and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young, and becomes a real estate and golf club developer. Over the course of this memoir, Ewell’s prose is pleasant, straightforward, and evocative. His descriptions of farm life are particularly vivid, as when he recalls how “evening dampness settled over the rows of raked, sweet-smelling alfalfa.” At times, however, he includes an overabundance of unnecessary detail that can slow the narrative; for example, the final, 25-page chapter of the book tediously recounts how “the never-ending lawsuits related to my divorce” threatened the author’s land-development project.
An often compelling life story that would have benefited from some streamlining.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68463-141-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
