Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.
Long-time literary journalist Atlas (Bellow, 2000, etc.) contemplates life and death in 11 poignant essays that chronicle the trials of growing older.
Originally published in the New Yorker, this “personal history” has universal implications. “Mom and Dad,” “Home,” “Money,” “The Body”—who doesn't have a book’s worth of thoughts and anxieties about any one of these biggies? Discussing events and relationships we all experience, the 50-plus author presents himself as an everyman complete with wife, kids, and a career that’s had its ups and downs. He can’t help but yearn for the American dream of stability, money, and happiness, but more than that he wants to understand how life works and what it all means. Atlas tells the stories of his family, colleagues, and friends, a well-educated urban crowd who should by all rights be happier than most, if money and education are the measures. But it ain’t necessarily so. What makes My Life outstanding is the author’s gift for peeling the veneer from the ordinary to reveal the significance beneath; his tendency toward the melancholic can be forgiven when it comes paired with his incisive observations. His son’s tennis prowess, for instance, prompts reflections on the gradual deterioration of his body, as well as a recollection of the day not so long ago when Atlas beat his own old man for the first time. “Failure” takes as its departure point the time just a few years ago when Atlas was fired from a job, but the essay moves on to consider the mystery of what success means, and how we all torture ourselves over the wrong-headed choices we’ve made. These painfully honest pieces are remarkable when taken in smaller doses, but reading them all at one sitting could be a body blow for those of a darker disposition.
Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019629-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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