Snyder (A Soldier's Disgrace, 1987, etc.) loses more than a job when he gets his walking papers from the university; his entire world shatters. Here, he mulls over his days of ruin and renaissance with an honesty that aches. Life had been good for Snyder before the fall: football scholarship, fat fellowships, the publication of several well-received books, then a gratifying job teaching English at Colgate, a fine family of three children. Out of the blue, Colgate upped and fired him. Surprise! Well, no problem, Snyder would simply find another teaching position, right? That was not to be, and his self-confidence faded fast. Snyder does a good job of dissecting the American Dream, how ``the little trap doors and hinges in her act'' revealed themselves quickly as his savings disappeared, how he slid down the slippery slope of self-pity, then crashed and burned in anger and fear. He pretty much bottoms out when he considers selling the baby he is convinced his wife is carrying. But the most powerful, as opposed to harrowing, material is found in the pitiful incidentals of his everyday life on the dole: how he would go to Sears to look at tires to clear his head; buy presents for his kids to bolster his esteem (his wife returned them); his obsession with budgets, as if in their numbers he would find some magic formula instead of diminishing reserves. It is all so immediate, so convincing, that it makes you cringe; it's terrifyingly easy to see yourself in Snyder's shoes. When he does finally get a break, readers will feel almost as relieved as Snyder did. Through the mill emerges a new Snyder, a better Snyder, his tale a cautionary one, as gruesomely captivating as a traffic accident.
Pub Date: April 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-80308-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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