Competently written, though weighed down by a narrative more tenuous than tangible.
One man’s philosophical explorations into the trials of childhood, adulthood and the Marine Corps.
In his debut memoir, actor/writer Busch—son of writer Frederick Busch—proves his own literary talents by delving deep into the memories of his coming-of-age amid war and literature. While his poignant, nostalgia-laced boyhood remembrances provide an occasionally entertaining backdrop, far more interesting are Busch’s experiences serving in Iraq. Yet even the war scenes take on a meditative gloss, replacing the pulse-pounding moments with muted reflections on life, death and the preservation of memory. In one particularly reflective passage, Busch writes, “People die with their stories every day, taking them and leaving a history of gathered objects.” The author seeks to spare himself the same fate, recording the epiphanies and minutiae of his life as if to keep from being forgotten. What the book lacks in narrative arc it makes up for in organization. Busch relies not on chronology, but thematic links, connections between his life and the elements with which he surrounds himself: water, metal, soil, bone, wood and others. The author’s ability to reveal beauty in the mundane—the dismantling of a sandbox, the drilling of an ice-fishing hole, the burial of a goat—does much to entice readers, but his somewhat sprawling narrative fails to reach its intended crescendo.
Competently written, though weighed down by a narrative more tenuous than tangible.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-201484-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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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