Growing up in the black middle class and attending Harvard, Lamar, a former associate editor at Time, had a foot in two worlds and feared he ``was terminally ambivalent.'' That ambivalence, as evident in this captivating memoir, seems rooted in Lamar's relationship with his domineering, abusive father. It's 1988 and Lamar, who hasn't heard from his father in five years, receives a phone call from an investigator looking into his father's business dealings. Jake, Sr., who became one of the highest ranking black officials in New York government during the Lindsay years, was determined that his son attend Harvard and become a lawyer. (When the acceptance letter arrived, Lamar's father ``whooped triumphantly. `We did it! We got into Harvard!' '') A workaholic and philanderer who would disappear for days at a time, Lamar, Sr., was also insanely jealous of his wife, bullying and smacking her around in front of the children: she eventually left their Bronx home and was hospitalized for depression. Experiencing hard times and bankruptcy, the elder Lamar saddled his son with a $25,000 debt to Harvard (his other children were left to fend for themselves), didn't attend the 1983 graduation, and refused to return his son's calls—whether out of jealousy or anger over his son's career choice is unclear. His progressively deteriorating personality led his son to feel that ``Every success I achieved was a measure of revenge.'' When the two briefly reunited in 1988, the father, though proud of seeing his son's name in Time, asked not one question about his life, job, or well-being. Crediting his father for his drive and determination despite the damage done, Lamar notes that ``He did the best he could.'' Painful and illuminating, and a far more perceptive look at the black bourgeois experience than Stephen L. Carter's Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby (p. 902).
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69191-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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