A superior and wise memoir: The old writer’s mechanical functions may be failing, but his ability to tell a story clearly,...
An autobiographer records the adventure of his own aging.
Now in the midst of his eighth decade, Murray (English/Univ. of New Hampshire) relives a lifetime filled with love and tragedy, struggle and triumph—in many ways not an unusual story. He endured a cramped, unhappy youth, the only child of peculiarly unloving and inept parents. School was miserable. A WWII paratrooper and military policeman, he took part in the Battle of the Bulge. The graphic descriptions of the carnage are among the most powerful parts of his text, and, after more than half a century, the author seems still not quite discharged from the scenes of war. Tragedy intruded even upon Murray’s peacetime world, through the death of his beloved daughter. With such a history, it’s little surprise that the author’s story resembles something that might be uttered on an analyst’s couch—but it is somewhat strange to hear Murray fret that he has presented one self to the world, while living another life in secret. His account becomes universal and ultimately sustaining in the end. He discusses such matters as the geriatric habit of accumulating stuff (and more stuff), the shame and management of incontinence, and the health problems (including diabetes, depression, Parkinson’s, and heart disease) that one may pick up across the years. Throughout it all, Murray is sustained by (and sustains) his wife, who is his comrade in the battle against burgeoning illnesses. They watch each other with an intimacy and compassion that will be a revelation to those of a younger generation.
A superior and wise memoir: The old writer’s mechanical functions may be failing, but his ability to tell a story clearly, thoughtfully, and forcefully is intact as he sends a report from a country foreign to most readers.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43690-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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