Third collection of compact autobiographical essays by the Pulitzer-winning playwright (Some Freaks, 1989; Writing in Restaurants, 1986). The 20 entries here share a tough, masculine flavor: Cigars, guns, beautiful women, and the romance of being a writer on the rise are the commanding notes. Most of the pieces celebrate locales: London, where Mamet scorns the food (``I don't think most Londoners could identify a vegetable with a gun to their head'') but salutes the teahouses; a cabin in Vermont, stinking of wood smoke and kerosene; Cambridge, Mass., where he gripes about recorded music in public places; and, above all, Chicago, home of his boyhood. It was at times a monstrous childhood. In his celebrated flat, precise voice, Mamet records how his stepfather beat his sister, how his grandfather tossed his mother down the stairs. Mamet's deadpan delivery sometimes flowers into hilarity- -for example, the time that he, ``a Nice Jewish Boy,'' was forced to eat platters of fried matzo when all he had in mind was sex on a bearskin rug with his latest conquest. Other essays talk of summer camp, listening to the radio, working in a truck factory, the ``friendly and hospitable fraternity'' of gun-shooting buffs. The characters, mostly men, are unforgettable, even if they appear only for a paragraph—such as Louis Herrmann, eye-doctor brother of composer Bernard Herrmann (``he was a beautiful man''). Once or twice, the prose is so lean that it turns artless—a report from Cannes becomes a laconic dribble bleached of emotion. Mostly, however, things crackle; Mamet offers a tribute to T.H. White's The Goshawk that fits his own work as well: ``The prose is hard and clear as crystal. It is unsentimental, it is simply written, it is a delight and an inspiration.'' Like the title says, not a mansion, not a cape or a ranch, but a cabin of words: bare wood and nails, hammered tight.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41558-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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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