A well-written autobiography, artfully folding in another’s story, and alternate course, along with the author’s own.
One man’s slow drift away from the faith of his father.
Looking back on his younger years, biographer Lax (Conversations with Woody Allen, 2007, etc.) provides an intriguing coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam era. The son of an Episcopal priest, religion played an important role in much of the author’s life, but it is not always at the center of this autobiography. Lax begins with his childhood as the son of two models of Christian piety. Through his parents the author learned about integrity and loving his neighbor, and it was because of their good example that he accepted the Christian faith without question. He entered Hobart College in 1962 and things began to change: “The Book of Common Prayer, where I had been content to find my answers, was suddenly a slim volume indeed.” After Hobart, Lax was faced with the formidable quandary of his day, Vietnam and the draft. He struggled with the decision of whether or not to declare himself a conscientious objector, and whether his growing pacifist beliefs were indeed genuine or self-serving. To avoid both the draft and the conscientious-objector question for a time, he enrolled in the Peace Corps. Assigned to the Truk Islands in Micronesia, Lax spent two years on a tiny island of 185 inhabitants. This tale alone provides a fascinating core for the book, but Lax also juxtaposes his experiences with those of a close friend who enrolled as an Army officer in Vietnam. His friend returned from an intense and horrifying war experience and entered seminary, while Lax came back from the Peace Corps and eventually applied for conscientious-objector status. As his friend became a priest and then a bishop, Lax’s faith slowly receded, and the book comes to a melancholy end with the death of his parents.
A well-written autobiography, artfully folding in another’s story, and alternate course, along with the author’s own.Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27091-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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