An overdramatic, occasionally clichéd recounting of a childhood in rural America.
One rural boy's misadventures with his younger brother in the foothills of Appalachia.
Storyteller Davis conjures humorous tales from his boyhood, packaging them in memoir form. The author’s humor often takes on a grandfatherly tone—innocent and innocuous—allowing an older generation of readers to ease into a comfortable nostalgia, and his stories unapologetically sentimental. In “Too Much Hair,” older brother Donald tricks his brother Joe into receiving an amateur haircut, though the boys' father soon intercedes on his youngest son's behalf, offering Donald his own amateur haircut as retribution for his crimes. Similarly, in “Responsible,” Donald and Joe become addicted to a wrestling show, though their attempts to emulate the burly men leave them far more damaged than the performers on the screen. “Golf Tees” serves as a third example of tough lessons learned. After a 6-year-old Donald thoughtlessly swipes golf tees from a local store, his mother forces him to face the manager and own up to his mistakes. But when his mother realizes that her son's behavior will reflect poorly on her, she alters her allegiance, becoming his partner in crime by distracting the store's employees while her son returns the tees to their rightful place. Davis relies heavily on punch lines delivered from the mouths of babes, offering a collection of homespun stories that will undoubtedly appeal most to those who can relate to growing up in the 1940s and ’50s. While Donald and Joe share center stage, perhaps the collection's star is their father, a judicious man often forced into the roles of judge, jury and executioner as he wades through his sons' harmless disputes.
An overdramatic, occasionally clichéd recounting of a childhood in rural America.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-89587-507-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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