An engaging, reflective memoir.
Brennan’s debut memoir depicts one man’s journey through war, love and loss.
How do we become who we are? Brennan’s debut memoir looks at the decisions that he feels made him the person he is today, and also shows the values of his family and his old neighborhood. Raised Roman Catholic in Jersey City, N.J., in the 1940s and ’50s, Brennan’s earliest memories are of men in uniform. His father and uncles all served in World War II, and during that time, he and his mother lived with his grandmother, prompting a close and lasting extended-family relationship. His father returned home when he was 4, and over the years, they could never quite move past a strained relationship. Brennan compensated with a love for baseball, a sport played in his neighborhood streets as well as in Roosevelt Stadium, a mere 15-minute walk from his home. The author’s passion for the sport carried him through his entire life and helped form his identity. He was also influenced by his time in the Army; he served in Germany just four years after the Berlin Wall was built. His responsibilities mainly consisted of keeping the soldiers in his platoon in line, and his sense of leadership, duty and purpose inspired him to pursue a job in teaching after he returned to America. He also dabbled in acting and singing along the way. The author effectively describes his childhood and adulthood, highlighting moments that he feels helped form him as a person. His recognition of his life’s influences lends texture and meaning to the story, which may compel readers to similarly reflect upon their own lives. Overall, he delivers a gentle tale of how his past helped create his future.
An engaging, reflective memoir.Pub Date: May 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482366297
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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