As an artist and a person, what Parms desires most of all is “to soak everything in,” and as she does so, we find her to be...
A debut author exhibits a mind brimming with ideas and fired by self-inquiry, drawn equally to the wondrous and tragic, with thoughts framed in sections named after the sculptures of Degas, Bernini, and Rodin.
Early on, Parms' (Writing/Vermont Coll. of Fine Art) ruminations can feel overly airy, more tenuously connected ramblings than essays. One wishes she would be less inclined toward free-form exposition, her words filling the space “like careless teenagers,” and simply stick to the point. But perhaps this is mistaking a fugitive continuity for lack of cohesion or wanting to impose order on a writer who canters like an intellectual mustang. For all its deceptively fractured moments, the collection possesses a kaleidoscopic unity, one that gradually grows more appealing and provocative. The child of a biracial, bohemian couple who divorced in her youth, Parms soon learned of the transience and frailty of ideals. Possessed of an “archival instinct to reconstruct and conserve the mundane pieces of a moment,” the author’s approach also captures, often in a euphoria of expression, startlingly poetic insights. Parms is invigorated by eccentricity, her own and that of others', though this can lead to narrative dissipation at times. Yet at its best, the book exhumes treasures secreted in her “almanac of riddle and wonder,” surmounting the limits of language to convey human experience. The author offers beautiful reflections on memory, art, identity, and living within the interstices of the world, and she provides many gems of observation and expertly crafted metaphors and similes. Along the way, Parms also injects the book with an array of arresting historical, cultural, and aesthetic asides.
As an artist and a person, what Parms desires most of all is “to soak everything in,” and as she does so, we find her to be a perceptive, unsettling, and surprisingly endearing guide.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0820350158
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
