A literary memoir that's part paean to the golden-age South and part unstinting critique of that region's corrupting segregation and cultural rigidity. Award-winning novelist Spencer (The Night Travellers, 1991, etc.) has led a peripatetic life, traveling widely in Europe and living for many years in Canada. But her hometown of Carrollton, Miss., remains a locus for both memory and fiction. She writes glowingly of a happy childhood in the 1920s and '30s, surrounded by a doting extended family and immersed in the genteel rhythms of plantation life. Early on, she realized the importance (and the constriction) of maintaining appearances in a society where orderliness and prescribed behavior were paramount. Her problems with authority and her budding noncomformity—expressed first in a love of books and writing and later in her support of desegregation—eventually led to estrangement from her father, a businessman who valued commerce above art and racial equality. Spencer's preference for remembering her hometown's nurturing goodness, rather than the flaws that drove her out, is illustrated by her refusal to revisit the decrepit remains of once-grand mansions inhabited by family and friends: ``Where Carrollton is concerned it seems a desecration to recognize that time exists at all.'' She does confront Mississippi's intransigence on race, recounting her horror over the Emmett Till murder and the inseparable divide it opened within her family. Tales of travel in Germany, Italy, France, and England (and her life as a published but impoverished writer in New York) paint a romantic picture of bohemian life. Literary friendships and encounters with Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and a memorably frosty William Faulkner are detailed in entertaining and vivid thumbnail characterizations. More than simply personal history, Spencer's self-portrait of her literary development dramatically personifies the high price the South paid for driving out its best and brightest. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45739-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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