Tobacco chaw and human weighings by a professor of English (Texas Christian Univ.) who wonders whether he exists, and who finds the greater public crises of past decades writ small in his own life. Corder is a kind of down-home Kafka whose fingers skim the air in hopes of netting some pollen from a phantasmal 20th-century life. His clear, uncluttered style never tires the reader, though one keeps waiting for a more passionate quickening. Vague confessions arise: ``Perhaps I am the twentieth century, mostly shallow, mostly superficial, incapable of great art or much of anything, genuinely, thoroughly mediocre, watching at a distance as the trivial becomes monstrous, the monstrous trivial.'' One palpates such writing for feeling beyond word play, and it's not always there. Even so, Corder unearths enough of his heart to keep us hungry for some big dish that may lie ahead. What we get are linked epiphanies, daisy chains of homecomings for a Ulysses who never left. Every great change, Corder finds, brings nostalgia in its wake, and he charts his own sighs as wave-patterns in the culture. One sigh springs from his own deconstruction: ``Language is orphaned from its speaker'' and lodges ``in the perceiving minds of readers....Authors...now fade away into nothing.'' We win such small leavings, he warns. ``Can I get a witness? Can you? Can she, or he? In texts that are absent?'' Through haze, Corder finds himself in childhood comic books, road maps, snapshots, the Depression, the Lux Radio Theater, the Holocaust—and in forlorn thoughts of a daughter now far off, whose skin temperature he traces daily in weather reports. Subliminal grieving for a life lived in ribs of dust.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8203-1419-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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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