Travel memoir about the author's four trips to Japan that grows like a novel and takes on unusual richness as it keeps reinvesting itself in earlier scenes and people. Davidson (English/Duke; co-ed., The Last Tradition, 1980, etc.) and her husband, Ted, first moved to Osaka in 1980 to teach at ``Kansai Women's University'' (a fictional composite), where she instructed a class in spoken English. Despite trying several times, the author never did master Japanese—though it must be said that, in turn, most of her Japanese students seemed to have learned an artificial English that has little tie to own. Davidson writes about almost nothing for itself alone but, rather, for its emotional impact on her, and nearly all the people she describes here are composites who become vehicles of feeling. She writes this way because the Japanese usually hide their deeper feelings, and those she knows personally would be embarrassed by appearing recognizably on these pages—especially being portrayed in exactly the emotional states they usually cover over most carefully. These novelistic devices, along with the way the Davidsons' visits to Japan gather depth of feeling, lend her account a personal quality all her own—and may give it a longer life than most travel memoirs. Davidson reveals little new about the Japanese, but what she makes clear are the shame and humiliation she most commonly feels with her students, fellow Japanese teachers, Japanese friends, and street people, all of whom see her as gaijin (foreigner) and cry out ``Speak no Engrish!'' (Perhaps because of this humiliation, the Davidsons, rather than settle down in Japan, finally build a Japanese house in North Carolina). Over the ten years covered, many deaths occur, especially in the final pages, which adds a memorable darkening to the text. Top-drawer. (Eighteen line drawings)
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93707-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
