A richly detailed, lovingly told memoir of the author’s tempestuous 1950s boyhood in an Irish-Italian neighborhood of New York City. Smith (Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words, 1988, etc.), his older brother, Billy, and his disciplinarian mother, Mary, lived in a squalid, roach-infested tenement building on New York’s Lower East Side. The family was on welfare; their absent father resided in an insane asylum upstate, creating a “big empty hole” at the center of their impoverished existence. While brother Billy was an exemplary child, Dennis had a nose for trouble, consistently being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He would hang around with the neighborhood hoodlums, joyriding in stolen cars, fighting in drunken brawls, buying heroin in Harlem, and quitting school at 15. He was hellbent on self-destruction. Through it all, his mother fought a seemingly futile battle to save her son from a future of despair. She stayed up waiting for his return from an all-night bender, demanding an explanation. “Like a cop from the 17th Precinct,” she was the conscience that wouldn’t let him surrender to the lure of the streets. She wasn—t alone in caring for Smith: brother Billy passed out advice and the occasional beating; a respected Boys’ Club counselor named Archie demanded that Dennis stop wasting his life. Catholic school helped, bequeathing him a guilt-ridden conscience that hamstrung his adolescent sex life. By the time he was facing imprisonment for assault, smith understoond his mother’s message. By book’s end, he’s transformed his life, earning his GED, joining the New York City Fire Department, getting married, and becoming an upstanding citizen. The final few pages are a paean to the American values of hard work and caring for others. Like Pete Hamil in A Drinking Life, Smith has written an absorbing memoir that vividly re-creates the pains and joys of an impoverished Irish-American boyhood. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52447-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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