An unexpectedly melancholy meditation on marriage, mortality and the merits of living in suburbia.
The story of a newspaper columnist who got a second shot at love and happiness in the suburbs—only a crazed rooster named Buddy stood in his way.
Just a few years back, Boston Globe associate editor McGrory experienced the failure of his first marriage and the death of his beloved dog Harry. His professional career was still thriving, but the successful journalist knew it was time for a change. Remarkably, that change came with a person he had already known for years: Pam, Harry’s veterinarian. Of all the challenges the couple contemplated after deciding to get married and move to the suburbs, the last thing they imagined was a vengeful pet chicken. With suitable exasperation, McGrory recounts the incessant crowing, ambushes in the yard and nonstop defecation. This is an oddly morose memoir filled with as much sadness as joy. Harry’s ghost hangs heavy over everything, as the author’s strange preoccupation with loss—even as he stands to gain so much—ultimately proves frustrating. Even the almighty Buddy is something of a disappointment, little more than a feathered neurotic lashing out at a perilous world he sees as unremittingly threatening. Readers who adore their pets will no doubt identify with the profundity of losing a cherished animal, but the unrelenting somberness juxtaposed with the occasionally silly moment make for an uneven narrative.
An unexpectedly melancholy meditation on marriage, mortality and the merits of living in suburbia.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95306-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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