A doleful debut, heartfelt but disappointing.
A son remembers his North Carolina childhood in the 1960s: his abusive father, his loving mother and the racist climate that empowered a judge to place the boy in foster care when his mother became involved with a black man.
Cheek has a truly troubling tale to tell. His father was a racist and alcoholic brute who beat both his wife and his son. (The father’s relatives seem similarly unpleasant.) Cheek’s mother is all but angelic in the author’s recollection—affectionate, wise, compassionate, understanding—but also poor, forced to work long hours in menial jobs. The author likes her family much more, especially his uncle Bill, who for most of the story is loving and protective of his sister and nephew. (Later, though, when the author’s mother has an illegitimate child with the black man she adores, her relatives banish her.) Cheek tells about his mother’s tribulations with his father, about her decision, finally, to leave him, about her involvement with a local black man (a virtual saint, in the author’s eyes), about the vicious reaction in town to that involvement—and to the child that ensued (the KKK burned a cross in the yard). The principal crisis occurs when a court removes the author from his mother’s care, an action initiated by the 12-year-old’s father and his odious family. He bounces from foster care to a boys’ home and sees his mother only occasionally. Years later—after most of the principals have died—he forgives everyone, including himself for failing to be the husband he had always hoped to be. (His own marriage disintegrated.) Cheek’s pain is evident throughout, but unfortunately so is his lack of skill: He spins his tale with so little craft that the narrative loses virtually all of its potential strength, overshadowed by diction that’s often trite, dialogue that’s unconvincing and dramatic shaping that just isn’t there.
A doleful debut, heartfelt but disappointing.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59228-626-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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.
