Poet and playwright Sherborne displays a sharp, sardonic voice.
A rural, coming-of-age memoir set in New Zealand, featuring a dairy farm and feckless parents.
Leaving urban Australia for a spread of 300 acres in the environs of Taonga (pop. 3,000), young Sherborne, with Dad (“The Duke”) and Mom (“Feet”), embarked on a life envisioned suitable for the distinguished landed gentry they planned to become. The Duke was self-important, Feet was a serious snob and their artistic scion, an only child who could accurately mimic Elvis and Nat King Cole, was as bewildered and self-centered as any adolescent. The author, putative heir to the property grandly named Tudor Park, tried to tame a pugnacious horse trainer and deal with an irascible cowhand and his surly son. It was, after all, a place for future generations, even though the neighbors were commonplace folk, far beneath the civilized owners of Tudor Park. The locals were slobs, and the cows are simpletons. So reports the author, in the mode of a Down Under version of Holden Caulfield—indeed, Sherborne was chosen to play the lead in his school’s musical version of Catcher in the Rye. As the growing teenager took it all in, rubbing the soil of the farm into his pores, The Duke taught his son about shaving and manliness, while Feet ranted constantly and gradually lost her sanity. In a distinctive, simultaneously caustic and funny style, the author writes poetically about family matters, adolescence, the farming life and “the pull of history.”
Poet and playwright Sherborne displays a sharp, sardonic voice.Pub Date: June 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-33790-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
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