A meandering journal of novelist Grumbach's 74th year that chronicles a final move from Washington, D.C., to the coast of Maine, and that includes brief, often charming, reflections on such diverse topics as mayflies, oxymorons, authors, and death. A follow-up to Coming into the End Zone (1991), which recounted Grumbach's ``intensely despondent'' 71st year, these month-by-month notes seek to examine whether the author's despair has lifted—and whether ``I may come upon some answers to the insistent questions of old age. Or perhaps only succeed in recording the minor thoughts and activities in the life of an aging woman.'' Grumbach begins her journal year with the publication of End Zone and ends it with a ``meditation'' on home, in particular her home in Maine, where she's found ``an interior landscape of serenity, isolation and solitude'' and has become less ``grumpy.'' In between, she offers snippets from La Rochefoucauld, Emerson, Anatole Broyard, and others; descriptions of life in Maine; accounts of her speeches, meetings, and book signings along the Maine/Washington corridor; entertaining anecdotes about the famous and not-so-famous; glimpses of family matters, centered around a daughter's cancer; a musing on love—all nuggets from which novelists craft their tales, but here unconnected and unshaped. Grumbach's work here will inevitably be compared to that of her friend May Sarton: Both are novelists removed to Maine, both are publishing journals on aging. Grumbach, however—probably because she's relatively younger, healthier, and more active than Sarton- -offers an account that's livelier, more wide-ranging, and less self-absorbed, though not much more profound. Written with polish and erudition, here are some budding insights into—but no answers to—the questions of old age.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03541-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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