Old-fashioned, wistful stories that will appeal to fans of Geist’s previous books.
The Emmy Award–winning correspondent of CBS Sunday Morning reminisces about the wonderful days of his youth.
During the 1960s, Geist (Way off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America, 2007, etc.) spent his summers working at a resort—the Arrowhead Lodge—owned by his aunt and uncle. In the middle of nowhere, down a winding road, the lodge provided the author with a place to work and make friends, drink beer, and meet girls. In this memoir, Geist takes readers back to those bygone days, sharing his escapades of what life was like for a young man with few experiences under his belt. The author often uses folksy humor to contrast those times with today. “A gas station attendant was a guy who filled your gas tank, checked your oil, coolant and battery fluids, and tire pressure,” he writes. “But those old gas stations did not sell hats and T-shirts, sixty-two different candy bars, fifty-seven kinds of refrigerated beverages, including twenty brands of bottle water. There were no ‘brands’ of water, only God’s. It was free. I know. Sounds crazy.” Threaded throughout this lightweight narrative are amusing, harmless memories of working in the kitchen during rush hour, cleaning out the open-air septic system, and fraternizing with the girls who moved in and out of Geist’s orbit. His portrayals of his fellow co-workers and his family are well-rounded, showing the good and bad in each individual. Geist’s writing is consistently nostalgic as he shows how those carefree summers helped mold him into the man he became. The book is a quick, pleasant read that effectively reflects how his time at the lodge showed him that “life is more difficult and rewarding and fun when you manage to do things your way.”
Old-fashioned, wistful stories that will appeal to fans of Geist’s previous books.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2980-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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