In a bizarre mixture of joint autobiography and sociology, occasionally complemented by detailed instructions on well-drilling, the Covington writer/spouse duo rehashes about 20 years of their stormy, messy married life. The tale of Vicki and Dennis offers no theme of general interest and is perhaps just as trivial or as original as the life story of any random passer-by. The difference here lies in a relatively sophisticated narrative technique that alternates the voices of husband and wife, each of whom in turn provides an individual interpretation of the same events. Vicki’s account is emotionally charged, while Dennis sticks to a more balanced and precise journalistic manner. Natives of Alabama, where they wind up again after several brief sojourns elsewhere, the couple have had a lifestyle mÇlange of hippie and pseudobohemian, which seems to defy their parents’ basic southern values. Drugs, alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and adultery, punctuated by a mÇnage Ö trois with one of Dennis’s fellow college professors, mix to form a pretty nauseating cocktail of the Covingtons’ earlier married life. Just when Vicki’s maternal instinct awakens, she is afflicted with an ectopic pregnancy, years of infertility treatment, eventual pregnancy by her husband’s buddy, and a subsequent abortion. She finally gives birth to two of Dennis’s daughters, their literary careers take off, and their life normalizes to a certain extent, although extramarital affairs remain omnipresent. The Covingtons’ return to the Southern Baptist Church appears as abrupt and unconvincing as their pathetic urge to drill water wells in El Salvador to satiate their “spiritual thirst.” The final chapters of the book feature frequent quotations from the Bible and pop songs, melodramatic talk of forgiveness, and sadomasochistic confessions the two make to each other about their respective lovers. One hopes that the story of the Covingtons’ “crimes and misdemeanors” will prove therapeutic for the authors, as the readers will find it neither edifying nor amusing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-86547-548-2
Page Count: 124
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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