Frank, curmudgeonly wisdom. Carruth (Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, 1996) is nothing if not a contradiction: a professor who scorns that word and derides academia as antagonistic to art-making; a poet of appealing modesty, erudition, and formal grace whose psychic life, as described here, has veered into every sort of excess; an outsider to the poetry establishment who yet has received many of its most coveted awards, edited its marquee publications, etc. It is thus no surprise that, from the title on, his succinct and wonderful book should declare frequently that it didn—t want or even need to be written. (Consider it ironic, then, that much of this collection should have appeared in print before, in the fine Suicides and Jazzers). The centerpiece here is an essay simply entitled “Suicide,” as moving and original as it is artless, that recounts in occasionally morbid detail the poet’s massive drug overdose in 1988: “In my suicide I experienced a renewal of luck . . . .I was ready for that renewal and for its reward in happiness.” Carruth’s dogged use of the term “suicide” despite his having survived does, however, skirt the line between pretension and profundity. The same could be said of another statement in another essay: “Where I am is the cosmic individual. Nothing grand, nothing romantic.” Elsewhere, though, Carruth writes passionately of his devotion to music—primarily jazz and the blues—and of its devotion to him over years of lonely labor and despair. Many fine passages detail his rural-but-not-rustic upbringing, which may have inspired his fondness for calling a spade no more (and no less) than a spade. Complains Carruth memorably, —Our lives are supposed to be —fun— and not much else.— His own preference: —A life of hardship that was nevertheless possible was the luckiest thing that could have happened to me in my middle age. If I didn—t choose it, I quickly acquiesced in it.——
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55659-089-X
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Copper Canyon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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.
