The thread that binds these essays on death and mayhem is the author’s love for his children and wife, which offers readers...
One man’s fears are exposed as he faces death in its many disguises.
In 2011, as a massive tornado whirled outside, Hollars (English/Univ. of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us about Life, Death, and Being Human, 2015, etc.) and his wife were huddled in the bathtub under a pile of cushions. They had just learned days before that their first child had been conceived, which still had the couple reeling with emotions. Suddenly, the enormity of bringing a new life into the world overwhelmed the author as the potential destruction of their lives rampaged just next door. “As our house creaked and our neighborhood swayed, what suddenly seemed most unfathomable was our lives stripped of that future,” he writes. “We’d interpreted the plus sign as a promise, and we expected the universe to make good.” In these essays, Hollars provides an offbeat look at the fragility of human life and our resilience when faced with death and destruction. After examining the days and months after the tornado ripped through his town, the author delves into stories of children who have died by becoming trapped inside refrigerators; ponders the readiness of Fort Wayne, Indiana, during World War II if there had been a German attack on the town, since this is where multiple parts of the atomic bomb were manufactured; and links Hiroshima and Fukushima via stories of radiation. Throughout, Hollars underlines his fears for both himself and his family. His grave discussion emphasizes the helplessness we feel when faced with forces of nature beyond human control and the fear we experience when confronted with humans who cause mass destruction.
The thread that binds these essays on death and mayhem is the author’s love for his children and wife, which offers readers a respite from the inherent grief and devastation he poetically describes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-01817-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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