A mixed bag but overall a well-written and thought-through exercise in remembrance.
A fan’s notes on forming a friendship with a favorite author, mixed with other reminiscences of life and loss.
Now in his early 60s, Garcia (Without a Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans, 2017, etc.) entered a Chicagoland teendom with a fascination with Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron of World War I fame, who died at the age of 25 while looking to add to his count of 80-plus Allied planes shot down. The author came by that fascination by accident, having chanced on a biography in a bookstore. “By the time I put the book down,” he writes, “I’d come to realize that Richthofen was once a boy like me who also had a desire for adventure.” Garcia’s own adventures, while less lethal, took him early into the land of Richthofen scholarship, beginning with the author of that biography, Dale Titler, to whom Garcia wrote a fan letter, opening a sporadic, decadeslong correspondence and finally a meeting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “For now,” he writes, “they contemplate each other a moment longer…past and present merging into the now middle-aged man he holds against him, no longer a boy although he can’t help but think of him as that driven youngster….” In the essays where Titler appears, Garcia has a fine foil. Other autobiographical pieces in this set of connected essays are less focused, though some have the grit and bite of a good noir novel: “About a year after Bill stabbed Johnny in the neck,” opens one, “Randy began drinking again.” There’s a whole tragedy built into those few words, as with other scattered moments: “A blind woman I know told me that with each passing day it gets harder and harder for her to remember what it was like to see.”
A mixed bag but overall a well-written and thought-through exercise in remembrance.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62872-869-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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