To his credit, Hays doesn’t oversentimentalize things; to his discredit, he never makes his journey the story it could have...
A semiretired theater director, at age 66, finally becomes a man.
When Hays approached his rabbi at his local diner and mentioned that he was interested in being bar mitzvahed, he expected to be talked out of it. Rabbi Doug instead enthusiastically gave Hays his vote of confidence and an impromptu lesson in Hebrew. By the following autumn Hays found himself the sole adult in a classroom with seven other students. Without stressing too laboriously the sentimental ironies and poignancies of his inner-child’s journey toward the bema, Hays describes how he spent the rest of the schoolyear tackling prayers, participating in class discussions, going on field trips, drawing pictures in crayon on newsprint, and monitoring the changes in the other students—whom he dubbed the Hormone Hurricanes—and himself. (He even developed an avuncular version of a schoolboy crush on one of the girls at school.) Events in the extracurricular life of a 66-year-old man being of a different nature than the cusp-of-puberty changes in preadolescence, the account of his year of learning the V’ahavta has a unique tone; there were several deaths of former colleagues and various relations, including his own mother. The narrative has texture to spare, but it lacks the structure and shapeliness that might have made it more compelling. A timeline would have helped (at one point the story jumps ahead a couple of months, only to jump back a few chapters on), and far too many details about the specifics of bar mitzvah study and the ceremony itself are withheld (gentile readers may find themselves as uninformed at the end as they were at the start). From the weightlessness of the sketchy prose it seems that Hays gave great attention to his religious study at the expense of his literary project; his story feels reconstituted from notes scribbled between the lines of Hebrew lessons rather than shaped by observation, selection, and retrospection.
To his credit, Hays doesn’t oversentimentalize things; to his discredit, he never makes his journey the story it could have been. A disappointment.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0126-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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