Smart, disarming, and forgivably sentimental.
A former television star who took to the trail extols a disappearing way of life.
Parker, star of ’80s detective drama Simon and Simon, has almost nothing to say about his acting career, other than to discuss why it eventually became enervating. Instead, his debut memoir begins when he leaves LA for parts just slightly east and deeper into the American West: the California ranch country of the Sierras. With his horse-loving wife Darleen, the author joins up with local cowboys, seeking to learn just how this quintessentially western job is done today. Whenever possible, he pitches in on cattle drives, helps out at brandings, looks on at auctions, and asks questions of men who excel in giving one- and two-word answers. Deeply enamored of this life rooted in the land, Parker takes the reader along on his beginner’s tour of the basics of the cowboy way. He may know little about herding balky cattle, avoiding cantankerous bulls, or heating branding irons, but he’s endlessly eager. Local trainers are profiled with deep admiration and respect. Cattlemen and cowboys are drawn with admiring strokes. The economics and politics of ranching, a true morass, are examined with a respectable attempt at evenhandedness. The habits of cows and horses come in for scrutiny, and Parker’s mare, Miss Flirt, is a character in her own right. The only digressions are periodic references to the traumatic shooting that resulted in a depression that led, in turn, to the author leaving Hollywood. Most of the limelight, however, is reserved for the cowmen. Perhaps most surprising are Parker’s writing chops: the language is expressive and intelligent, despite the author’s best efforts to imitate his laconic heroes.
Smart, disarming, and forgivably sentimental.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31024-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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