The key to the memoir’s cumulative power is Walker’s narrative command; the rite of passage is rockier than most, making the...
A memoir in which a young boy comes to terms with the religious cult that had given his family hope.
In this follow-up to the author’s Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption (2011), a debut that proved a breakthrough in terms of awards and recognition, the focus is tighter and the narrative challenge considerable, as Walker (Creative Writing/Emerson Coll.) assumes the perspective of the boy he was from ages 6 through 14, in a black family belonging to the overwhelmingly white (and segregationist) Worldwide Church of God. Its charismatic founder, Herbert W. Armstrong, had prophesied that only the anointed “chosen” would find redemption upon the Earth’s imminent destruction. Young “Jerry” would barely be 11 years old when this would happen, and he accepted the prophecy on faith, though the specifics of his religion confused his young mind. His alcoholic, epileptic father and his mother—both blind—had embraced the cult in part because they thought sight would be their reward. They also had some secrets in their pasts that their son would only learn later. As the predicted apocalypse of 1975 failed to happen and the boy matured and experienced more of the world, he lost faith in the church, as did other congregants and members of his family. He found himself torn between Armstrong’s vision of a better life to come and the streetwise testimony of Iceberg Slim and other hustlers. At a pivotal point, he writes, “my life isn’t becoming a real horror show, I’m thinking. It’s been one for a long time.” He asked his older brother, “How do you un-believe a belief?” and he learned “how the world is full of deception, how very few people can really be trusted, how it’s important that I learn to think and make decisions on my own.”
The key to the memoir’s cumulative power is Walker’s narrative command; the rite of passage is rockier than most, making the redemption well-earned.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2750-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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