Well-meaning and obviously cathartic, but hardly transformative.
Chirpy, largely forgettable essays on relationships.
Joseph (Creative Writing/Minnesota State Univ., Mankato) assumes a kind of Everywoman tone in these vignettes about the men in her life. There are moments of sharp, biting prose, especially in the first essay, “Tongue Twister, Tongue Tied,” in which her father—a kind of chain-smoking Ralph Cramden who rarely wore a shirt and referred to her brothers as “assholes”—lectures the author as a young girl about sex only once, offering advice on promiscuity (“when a girl goes with this one, and then with that one, and then with that one over there, and with who knows how many others, what happens is people start to talk”). The first man who swept her off her feet was a hapless older demolition-derby racer (“Love in the Age of Ick”) who called her Momma and wanted to fatten her up to increase her “rack.” “Did I really love him,” wonders Joseph, “or did I just hate myself?” In “What’s (Not) Simple,” she delineates her relationship with her first husband, Karl Bennett, a man twice-divorced, 20 years her elder and with a daughter three years younger than she: “I sort of suspected he had some weird ideas about what a woman’s place might be.” Regardless, they married when she was six months pregnant; the product of that ill-starred union is called “the boy” in subsequent essays. He was born on Hitler’s birthday, had “trench foot” because he rarely took baths or changed socks, stayed indoors to play video games and held alarming political opinions. Nonetheless, Joseph assures us he was adorable. Her frank character portraits flay her subjects as blithely as herself—for example, her friend Andrew Boyle must have been a pervert because he took “art photos” of his naked girlfriends (“It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them”), and the hard-drinking English chair at the university where she taught routinely insulted her when drunk (“Lighten Up”). The low-key approach often veers into flat-footed, hackneyed prose.
Well-meaning and obviously cathartic, but hardly transformative.Pub Date: March 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15528-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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