An uneven—and even self-indulgent—mÇlange of autobiography and reportage from a Jewish writer with deep southern roots. Although Evans (Judah P. Benjamin, 1988, etc.) writes movingly in spots about the peculiar history and contemporary lives of Jews in the South, as a whole this collection of essays, most reprinted (from The New York Times, etc.), lacks depth and thematic cohesion. Evans possesses unassailable southern credentials: He writes of smuggling a vial of his native North Carolina soil into an N.Y.C. delivery room, holding it close to his wife to prevent their son from being ``born altogether as a Yankee....'' The author shines brightest when he writes personally about the lives of Jews in the ``mysterious underland of America.'' At the 1972 Miss America contest, he meets the first-ever Jewish Miss North Carolina, the daughter of Nazi concentration-camp survivors. Here, the distance between cultures and histories comes into focus as Miss North Carolina says painfully of her Jewish family, ``We cannot have family reunions...and that's a tradition in the North Carolina mountains. There are only four or five of [our relatives who survived the camps].'' But this story is a rare moment of poignancy in an otherwise punchless collection. Evans, a longtime freelance journalist and social/political activist, includes pieces on an unwieldy array of subjects, from fashion to politics to sports to Israel. Many of the essays seem little more than Evans's favorites on pet subjects, roaming far from the world of southern Jews, roped together with scant attention to balance. In one, we get advice on researching one's family history; in another, a long reprint of Evans's mother's obituary; and, in another, a laudatory interview of the author conducted by a Jewish academic and reprinted in its tedious 16-page entirety. A disappointing scrapbook seemingly designed more for the author than the reader.
Pub Date: July 31, 1993
ISBN: 0-87805-627-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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