Tales from a one-time Southern Baptist.
Cain’s memoir begins with promise in a gripping prologue. The reader meets the author in the midst of his young son’s desperate hospital experience, as the boy clings to life and the parents cling to sanity. The author hoped to receive some assistance from his parents, aging Tennessee Baptists a world apart from their New York City son, but his request was met only with excuses and an eventual brief and uncomfortable visit. Readers begin to understand that whatever has passed in the intervening years, Cain and his parents are no longer family except in name. Apparently drawn to his memories through the trauma of his son’s illness, the author recounts various episodes from his boyhood and adolescence in Chattanooga. The book proves to be a page-turner, but Cain disappoints in two key ways. First, his vignettes are meant to pique the reader’s interest in Southern Baptist culture, but little of what is shared is particularly unique. Second, where the author does introduce meaty subject matter, he fails to deliver with introspection or analysis. For instance, in one scene Cain recounts being trapped in a car during a race riot, but aside from sharing the memory and the realization that race problems would not go away, he leaves the reader wanting more. As Cain prepared to enter college, he was obviously happy to be leaving, even fleeing, the culture of his youth. However, his transition from overly pious Evangelical teen to James Joyce–quoting, humanist college freshman is abrupt and unexamined. Though laced with interesting characters and descriptive writing, Cain’s memoir could have delivered so much more. Pleasantries and pathos, but not a lot of point.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46394-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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