A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.
A difficult father’s difficult final years, affectingly told by a son who, along the way, experiences just about the entire range of human emotion.
Cooper, a novelist, memoirist and essayist (The Year of Rhymes, 2001, not reviewed, etc.), begins with an account of an offer from a publisher to write the story of his father. But the younger Cooper finds the task impossible: His father—a retired Los Angeles divorce lawyer—does not like to talk and protects his emotional life with Cerberean tenacity. Years later comes this narrative, written after his father’s death in 2000. The tale is framed by two films. The first was one his father had showed him, an 8mm production about a so-called “miracle chicken” that lived without its head. The second is a video called To Hell and Back, produced by a Christian evangelist, that dramatizes the near-death experiences of five men who saw visions of Hell. This was a gift his father’s nurse, Betty, had given her patient as he neared death. (Nurse and father were also lovers.) She was a hard-core Christian; he, a casual Jew. In between are many other stories about dealing with Dad, about suffering through the deaths of three older brothers, about beginning his writing career. Cooper includes some scenes with his lover/therapist, Brian, who seems ever flawless and unvaryingly wise—a real-life counterpart to Robert B. Parker’s Susan Silverman, that cloying lover/therapist who threatens to vitiate each of the Spenser PI novels. Cooper amuses with accounts of trying to conceal from his father some passages he’d published about the man’s marital infidelities. And there are painful episodes—taking his father to doctors, enduring his sharp sarcasm, suffering through a three-year estrangement, receiving a $2 million bill from him for “paternal services.” And then the final shot to the solar-plexus, the epitaph his father had selected: You finally got me.
A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-4962-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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