While it should be heartbreaking, Barr tells a wonderful story, demonstrating the remarkable resilience of a child not only...
Memoir of the difficulties of growing up poor and gay in Margaret Thatcher’s Scotland.
Luckily, journalist Barr (Get It Together: A Guide to Surviving your Quarterlife Crisis, 2005) had a strong intelligent streak, a great love of books and a series of true friends. The author never had an awakening to his homosexuality; he, and everyone around him, just knew he was gay. The collapse of his parents’ marriage when he was 8 threw him into a difficult situation with Logan, the “wicked stepfather.” When his mother had a cerebral hemorrhage and spent six months away recuperating, Logan showed his true colors, poisoning the author and trying to drown him. While seeking to avoid Logan for all those months, Barr was desperately afraid to report him for fear of retribution against his sister. Ultimately, school became his saving grace, even with the taunting of schoolmates. He joined any club that would keep him after school for extended periods of time (“I’m on every team at Brannock High School that doesn’t have anything to do with throwing, catching, or kicking a ball”), and he also ended up at the top of his class in just about every subject. In addition to his personal story, the author follows the effects of Thatcher’s economic policies, as she canceled the free school milk, beat back the coal miners and closed the steel mill where his father worked. If ever a prime minister was hated, it was in the council houses of Britain; her name couldn’t be uttered without an expletive. Few readers will blame the author or anyone else angered by her methods; she massively cut social programs and suggested taxing the poor due to the fact that there were more of them.
While it should be heartbreaking, Barr tells a wonderful story, demonstrating the remarkable resilience of a child not only surviving, but succeeding in such a grand way.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-588-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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