Though fixed on what remains of some of history’s darkest moments, Rafferty’s essays, both gripping and wonderfully...
Moving reflections on the literal remembrance of acts too significant to forget.
In this riveting debut collection of lyric essays, Rafferty (Creative Writing/Univ. of Mary Washington) focuses on his “fascination with the scene of the crime, with the sites of history and what remains there,” and on “how concrete and steel and granite help us remember.” Blessed with a childhood unmarred by calamity, the author “did not believe” in his “own traumas,” so he “took on those of others” and traveled across America and Europe to explore the physical commemoration of historic acts—whether in the form of a monument, erected to celebrate a “triumph,” or a memorial, built to moor unspeakable tragedy. Though his subjects are often quite macabre, Rafferty’s empathetic analysis sheds light on topics many might find superfluous or an afterthought. In Whitefish Point, Michigan, at the site of a memorial to 29 men who drowned in November 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior, Rafferty points to the intriguing fact that not only did divers later bring up the Fitzgerald’s bell, now a museum centerpiece, but they cast another bell engraved with the names of the dead and then lowered that and welded it in its place “535 feet underwater,” creating “a memorial that truly was, as the inscription says but never means, for the dead.” Viewing the boarded-up windows of Columbine High School or thousands of stone markers in the pastoral fields of present-day Treblinka, site of a lesser-known death camp in Poland where 800,000 Jews perished in World War II, the author delves deep into the heart of past atrocities while probing the motivations of the living to memorialize, and he comes to some provocative conclusions. Rafferty also interweaves his own personal longings in a way that brings an even greater immediacy to his observations of weighty events.
Though fixed on what remains of some of history’s darkest moments, Rafferty’s essays, both gripping and wonderfully reflective, illuminate.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-01907-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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