A stark, honest book that reads like a writer’s apprenticeship amid harrowing circumstances.
A tragic accident gives birth to a writer.
Before the car crash that almost killed him, Narrative Magazine assistant editor Byars was a college student from a Southern family that included his identical twin brother, Will. This memoir of recovery against considerable odds traces the relationship between the brothers, their innate closeness, and what changed after the accident and what didn’t, but Will doesn’t figure nearly as prominently throughout as the title would seem to suggest. In much of the first half, the author seems to be trying to figure out just what is his story and how best to tell it. The crash in which he was a passenger threatened to kill him and initially seemed likely to paralyze him, and then he suffered post-surgical complications so severe that the doctors predicted he wouldn’t survive for more than one week. Byars beat the odds in terms of both survival and physical mobility, but he still faced a long road to what would never be all the way back. He had to relearn how to talk and to figure out how to get around on his own. And he was on his own a lot, partly by choice (“I only knew what I didn’t want to do: anything to do with stagnation. My parents seemed content with my doing nothing”) but also partly because others his age, particularly potential romantic partners, didn’t quite know how to deal with someone whose body had suffered so much. “My brain felt like the least damaged part of my body,” he writes. “It was painfully undamaged.” Despite occasional wishes that he had somehow forgotten who he had been or the extent of his predicament, his memoir is remarkably free of sentimentality or self-pity. He found both an outlet and a vocation in his writing, and he had to come to terms with the loss of those who had been prepared to lose him.
A stark, honest book that reads like a writer’s apprenticeship amid harrowing circumstances.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-29028-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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