Somewhat slight but never saccharine, a graceful homage to an ordinary man.
High-school English teacher Stone chronicles a journey of discovery that began when she received a case of diaries bequeathed to her by a former student who died of AIDS.
Vincent was in one of Stone’s very first classes, and they exchanged Christmas cards for more than 20 years, but they were never particularly close. She doesn’t remember that much about him, other than his response as a 15-year-old to “The Gift of the Magi” and a single visit when he was 16. When his box of journals appears on Stone's doorstep, it takes her a moment even to understand that she's looking at a record of Vincent's final years. Puzzled but moved, Stone then spends three years becoming ever more absorbed by the artifacts, filled with ephemera from the life of a gay man enjoying San Francisco and traveling around the world. Her mood is one of grim anticipation; though his entries start out jauntily enough, he is soon engulfed by the horror of the mysterious plague that races through his community. Vincent discovers his first Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions, pays hospital visits to friends who will never recover, and makes squares for the AIDS quilt in memory of those who have been claimed by the disease. Reading about his inexorable decline, Stone finds parallels in her own life, including her inability to connect with the memory of loved ones who have died and the crisis provoked by her mother's mental deterioration. Vincent becomes more and more intensely real to her, and as she sees him handle the pain of watching his friends cut down one after another, Stone garners insight into how to treat her mother with dignity while making the best possible arrangements for medical care.
Somewhat slight but never saccharine, a graceful homage to an ordinary man.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-315-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
