Younger readers who weren’t around during the Vietnam protest era will still feel like they’re missing something.
An overblown yet oddly sketchy memoir recalling Ayers’s days in the Weather Underground.
A spin-off of the leftist, antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weather Underground was formed in the late 1960s by a few hundred militant college students who became notorious as bombers after blowing up a policeman’s statue in Chicago and a bathroom in the Pentagon. They also induced violent riots and masterminded Timothy Leary’s prison escape. Members rationalized their terrorism in revolutionary terms. As Ayers tells it, “I was a full-time peace activist . . . our future existence hung in the balance. It fell to us—and we were just kids—to save the world.” Ayers captivates with heartfelt recollections of his friends in the Black Panthers, feminist groups, and Vietnam, attesting to his sincere wish to create a better world. Unfortunately, his passion cripples his credibility; he spends more time divulging emotions than describing his participation in terrorist acts, leaving us to wonder what actions he took and how effective they were. Much of this riveting American history is conveyed in rambling exposition that at its best moments has a Kerouac-like looseness, but more frequently denies significant characters and events the depth they deserve. Ayers’s memories are selective to the point of incomprehensibility. He goes on and on about his affair with “Diana,” later killed during an accidental explosion in a Weather Underground bomb factory, without bothering to mention her last name. (It was Oughton.) When he first meets SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn, she’s got a boyfriend Ayers finds intimidating; the next thing we know Bill and Bernadine are living together, with no explanation of where the boyfriend went. Although his fast-paced chronicle is at times explosive, Ayers too often rushes past intimate details and simply lists events rather than reenacting them in real time.
Younger readers who weren’t around during the Vietnam protest era will still feel like they’re missing something.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8070-7124-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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