Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious...
An award-winning biographer reveals his troubled past.
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bailey (Creative Writing/Old Dominion Univ.; Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, 2013, etc.) justifies his attraction to alcoholic subjects (John Cheever, Richard Yates, Charles Jackson) in this bleak, repetitious memoir. Bailey’s father was Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, his mother, a hard drinker trying to revive, in the Midwest, her bohemian Greenwich Village youth. Bailey and his older brother, Scott, became heavy drinkers in high school, even before their parents divorced, an event that disrupted an already strained family. Scott’s problems, though, went beyond drunkenness: At one point, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis that Bailey rejects—though he offers no other explanation for his brother’s erratic behavior, grandiose riffs, addictions, violence and ultimate suicide. Bailey chronicles Scott’s descent, but also notes that he, too, was an alcoholic. Scott, however, supplemented alcohol with various other drugs, including heroin. Their frustrated parents sometimes lashed out angrily, sometimes coddled their troubled sons. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white,” his mother told Bailey after Scott threatened to kill her. “There’s a little gray!” Some of Scott’s escapades seem like plots from a Cheever story: Scott “liked being in other people’s houses,” sneaking in during the night and staying for hours; in summer, he would “skulk around the suburbs,” bolting into family barbecues, stabbing meat and running off with it. The title of this memoir comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark’s 1969 “Yesterday When I was Young”: “…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.”
Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-23957-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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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