Glancy (the story collection Trigger Dance, 1990) won the North American Indian Prose Award for this wildly uneven grab-bag in the form of a journal: fresh language and banality, fine prose- poetry and self-indulgence. For Glancy, cut off young from her Cherokee grandmother, a connection to Native American culture seems as much willed as transmitted: After her divorce, ``I picked up my Indian heritage & began a journey toward [it].'' She explains that ``I was born between 2 heritages & I want to explore that empty space, that place-between-2-places'' through ``the breakdown of boundaries between the genres...the non-linear, non-boundaried non-fenced open-prairied words.'' In pieces such as ``Ontology & the Trucker\or, The Poem Is the Road,'' Glancy succeeds: While in the boundary-world of long-distance driving, she takes ``truckers who like to be followed'' as her almost mystical guides—they become ancient herds of buffalo migrating across the prairie, broken pieces of her intuitive, part-Cherokee father, even the form and energy of her poem. But too much of the book is devoted to warmed- over feminism, a justification of Glancy's Christian beliefs, along with sometimes lame comparisons of Christianity and Native American religion, and advice to writers that's so basic one wonders whether parody was intended. A worthwhile model for those advocating women's journal writing as a road to self-actualization and for people seeking to reconnect with a lost cultural heritage; other readers will be only intermittently rewarded.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8032-2140-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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