A flat account whose final aspiration (“[L]et the Holy Spirit fill the empty vessel”) falls as heavily across the page as an...
A sad chronicle of a failing marriage by a writer who finds hope and healing in nature and religion.
Brill (As Far as the Eye Can See, not reviewed) acknowledges at the outset that his family—wife, two pre-teen daughters—has become “a casualty of divorce.” Writing from east Tennessee in a remote cabin (his loving and sometimes amusing accounts of its construction consume much of the text), he says that he “needed to depart the temporal world for a time to delve deep into the world of spirit.” And so he took a six-months leave from his position as director of communications for a research center at the University of Tennessee and headed for the woods to write. Divided into seven sections, his memoir moves languidly through his courtship of his wife, the birth of children, the alterations of aspirations and careers, the trials and joys of parenthood, and many wrenching introspections (most of them wondering why he and his wife can’t find a way to reconcile). Enriching the story are periodic flashbacks to his hike of the entire Appalachian Trail, an ascent of Mt. Rainier, and various other stressful experiences (his father’s cancer, an elderly friend’s physical decline). At the center, however, stands the cabin, whose construction forms an ironic contrast to the destruction of his personal life. Brill’s fiery love for his two young daughters glows on nearly every page, but (although he claims to present an even-handed description of his divorce) he portrays his wife as a physical beauty who lacks his intellect and whose interests, counterpoised to his, seem superficial. (One evening they sat reading; his book was Walden, while she was “halfway through The Day Diana Died.”) The causes of the dissolution are vague—he can offer as reasons only “hurtful utterances, acts of neglect, and unfulfilled expectations.”
A flat account whose final aspiration (“[L]et the Holy Spirit fill the empty vessel”) falls as heavily across the page as an unanswered prayer.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94497-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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