A loving and often hilarious recollection of the author’s family and other denizens of East Texas’s Big Thicket region. Certain writers—Joseph Mitchell, Armistead Maupin, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few—have absorbed the essence of the region they write about so thoroughly that the settings themselves, as described by those authors, are just as crucial to a reader’s enjoyment as the plots and characters they surround. Swift (Mother of Pearl, 1990, etc.) has the good fortune to have grown up in a region whose very name—the Big Thicket—promises a rollicking tale or two, and he doesn—t disappoint. Now a national biological preserve, this area of East Texas was still wild enough during the author’s youth in the 1940s and ’50s that the eccentricity of its inhabitants was derived as much from their environment as their personalities. The author freely admits that “not only did [his family and friends from that time] live their lives as if they were characters springing from the pages of a book, they were front porch storytellers of the highest order.” Swift has inherited this storytelling gene, and the material that his family has provided is so bizarre that it frequently straddles the line between memoir and tall tale—the title episode, which involves an unusual pickling, being a case in point. Happily, the author manages to avoid the sentimentality of some other recent memoirs; though he shows great affection for his childhood friends and family, he harbors no illusions about them. Especially resonant are Swift’s portraits of the women of his family, particularly his mother, who was widowed in WWII and became the anchor of his extended family. He provides a funny, mournful depiction of her as a woman who “was about transcending sadness with laughter.” The mythic South at its most entertaining. (39 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2100-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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