Novelist Lowry (Breaking Gentle, 1988, etc.) delivers a stunning work of nonfiction, charting the growth of a strange but healing intimacy between herself and a young woman prisoner sentenced to die for a gruesome murder. In 1988, Lowry was still in the state of numbness that had arisen four years earlier when her 17-year-old son Peter had died in a hit-and-run accident. Peter had been troubled, and in trouble, for years, and Lowry's grief was compounded by an obscure sense of guilt at somehow having failed him as a mother. Then she read about Karla Faye Tucker in The Houston Chronicle, her hometown paper. Karla fascinated Lowry with the contrast between her innocent prettiness and the horror of her crime—the motiveless, drug- impelled pickaxe murder of a hated acquaintance and his female companion. The luridness of Karla's background—she was a call-girl mom who taught her two daughters her trade and shot heroin with them—made her story even more compelling. Lowry requested an interview, and Karla agreed, beginning a series of monthly visits in which the women shared details of their respective tragedies, as well as a lot of plain old restorative girl-talk. That Karla is Lowry's substitute child, the one she can do right by to make up for her self-perceived failure with Peter, and that Lowry is the good mother Karla never had, is an unavoidable inference—but there is more to this complex relationship: a shared taste between Lowry and Karla for mystery and impulse, and a mutual amazement as to ``how much happiness you can find within completely unacceptable givens.'' Gripping true-crime details and marvelous local color in Lowry's rendering of the wild, heartless boomtown of Houston make this a real page-turner. But most remarkable is the author's insight into the human capacity for extremes of violence and tenderness, brutality and nobility.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41184-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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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