A father tells timeless, funny, and honest stories of raising boys.
A father shares stories of his childhood and those of his two sons.
McGlynn (A Door in the Ocean, 2012, etc.) was not expecting to become a father when he did. When he and his wife found out their first child was on the way, he gulped nervously and moved into the role with a mixture of trepidation and elation. The author gathers tales of his two young sons and of his own childhood into an entertaining, humorous, and enlightening series of essays on fatherhood. Readers learn of his longing for his father, who divorced his mother and moved away when the author was 12. Suddenly, his father’s physical presence was reduced to a few weeks during the year, so McGlynn learned snippets of wisdom on growing into adulthood over the telephone, a touching memory of a pre-digital era. The author also shares moments of pride: watching his son at his first swim meet, supporting him at basketball games, and seeing him use the author’s old skateboard. McGlynn doesn’t ignore his struggles with his children: trying to discipline them when they used profanity, told their classmates that Santa was dead, or would not go to sleep at night. Throughout, the author’s love for his children is palpable, as is his feeling of achievement at having done the best that he could regardless of the situation. He and his wife have favored a smaller home in order to have more money for travel, giving up material goods for the chance to create lasting memories with their children, and he hopes they appreciate that approach as they grow into adults and have their own children. Overall, the book is neither shallow nor profound but a pleasing blend of humor and humility that shows what it means to be a father in America today.
A father tells timeless, funny, and honest stories of raising boys.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-039-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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