An engaging if ultimately somber 200-year history of a family and the rise and decline of the small Pennsylvania town that was their home. Journalist Simpson (The American Family: A History in Photographs, 1977, etc.) culled generations of daybooks, family stories, and histories to record the public lives and private longings of his relatives in a once proud railroad town called Parnassus, located east of Pittsburgh. It officially ceased to exist in 1931. Simpson uses a variety of homely talismans to reconstruct generations of family history and psychology: An 18th-century Indian captivity narrative mirrors his mother's lifelong feeling of oppression; an ankle bracelet tells the complex story of a thwarted love. By showing the unwavering adherence of his grandparents to the failing town, and to the 19th-century standards of family life and citizenship it represented, he is able to demonstrate how his relatives and their hometown became so deeply interconnected. Pittsburgh figures in the narrative as well. There are archetypal American elements in the history of that brawling city: immigrants, industry, union strife, and larger-than-life characters (Carnegie, Mellon, Frick). Simpson touches on these vivid elements but concentrates on the impact of the nearby city on his family, and he finds in the modest details of their lives a clear reflection of the larger American experience. By focusing on the end of the family and not harking (as do memoirists like Donald Hall and Annie Dillard) to the immutable cycles of nature, he loses a chance for solace, but in doing so maintains the integrity of his work. When the family dwindles to its last mortal member, there is no comfort—only Simpson's knowing reflection that ``they had gone as far as they could go,'' because with him, a homosexual, ``the end of the line had come.'' Uncomfortable in its finality, direct but not always graceful in style, this book is best read as the fulfillment of a final descendant's lifetime obsession.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94122-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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