The expansive narrative is in need of pruning. Still, this uniquely American story of race and ambition is of surpassing...
The daughter of former New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard (1920–90) relentlessly pursues the story of his mixed racial heritage, which he had concealed.
Bliss Broyard began her own career with a collection of short stories, My Father Dancing (1999), published nine years after her mother finally revealed that Anatole came from a New Orleans family of blacks and Creoles. Bliss and her brother were, to say the least, surprised. They had grown up in suburban Connecticut, spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard and attended exclusive, mostly white schools. Although the kids had met their grandmother and an aunt when they were small, their father never mentioned his large extended family in the Big Easy. After he died, his daughter determined to get it all and to get it right, embarking on years of prodigious research involving multiple trips to New Orleans; searches for birth certificates, former homes, places of business; numerous interviews with family, friends, lovers, employers. The result is a complicated and sometimes distracting tapestry that weaves together the Broyard family tree, her father’s biography and her mother’s much briefer backstory with her own childhood, adolescence and young womanhood. Adding to the narrative ungainliness are large—sometimes too large—doses of social history: of New Orleans, of race in America, even of DNA testing. Despite occasional silliness, as when the author mentions that some people had always said she danced like a black girl, the tone here is generally serious. A not-so-admirable Anatole Broyard emerges. Though his daughter endeavors to understand him, less forgiving readers will be repulsed by his cold rejection of his birth family, his serial sexual escapades before and during his marriages, his ferocious, vaulting ambition, his personal and professional arrogance, his paternal pettiness. These are not qualities that Bliss Broyard wishes to highlight, but she does not downplay them either.
The expansive narrative is in need of pruning. Still, this uniquely American story of race and ambition is of surpassing importance.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-16350-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
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