Readers looking for casual, innocent fun will find here a pleasant enough weekend in the country.
A city mouse, journalist by profession, is led by his smarter spouse to the country to escape the urban trap.
Does the idea of a guy from the Big Apple comically attempting to rusticate sound familiar? Think Green Acres. Think Mr. Blandings tackling his dream house. Don’t forget Squire Perelman’s Acres and Pains. Here is a venerable, fertile field, left fallow for a spell, but plowed anew to good effect by Mullen as he describes his migration from Greenwich Village to a place he is pleased to call “Walleye” in a county he names “Catskill” in a state he says is New York. Life at One Oak Farm on Spilt Milk Road is all a curmudgeon wit could want. There are comical neighbors and wise natives, and Mullen wonders at the strange rural folkways (such as repairing stuff on the fritz and waving to everyone). He considers such matters as country auctions, septic tanks, sugar maples, dowsing, and pumpkin weigh-offs. There are also fanciful agrarian implements like corn blowers, silo unloaders, and (get this, city folk) manure spreaders. Our metropolitan bumpkin has his troubles, of course, mainly with varmints and weekend guests. (Do not try this formula material at home, readers; the author is a professional humorist.) Since the whole thing was engineered on the distaff side, the snappy repartee between husband and wife is the sort that hasn’t been heard since the heyday of the late, lamented Bickersons. All turns out well, naturally, as the Mullens evolve into ex–New Yorkers, settling for the simple life. Ultimately, it is Love Among the Rubes.
Readers looking for casual, innocent fun will find here a pleasant enough weekend in the country.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1131-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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