A slow, sweet homage to two Midwestern towns.
A collection of memories and narrative vignettes that chronicles the vibrant people who populated rural Wheaton and Rocky Comfort, Missouri, between 1907 and 1960.
Lewis paints, in alternating broad and fine strokes, a picture of a small segment of the rural United States through difficult and prosperous eras. He has an eye for satisfying detail, and he thoroughly catalogs a colorful cast of characters (a bevy of endnotes that reference hundreds of local news articles, periodicals, and more). The author uses memoir and journalistic reporting to show how his personal history maps onto his neighbors’ in two towns where there were no true strangers. The titular jar flies are said to sound like “a bad bass fiddle player sawing a grating note,” a constant buzzing presence that nearly suggests itself as the rural drama’s Greek chorus. Some of the most rewarding sections of the book explain the inner workings of Wheaton and Rocky Comfort’s agrarian systems, including the processes of supply bartering and community support for the infirm or downtrodden. At one point, Lewis fondly remembers a man named Mack Harader who’d given him a ride in his truck as a boy, and who was supported in financial and moral ways by his neighbors after a paralyzing stroke left him nearly immobile. Plenty of action abounds in stories about a grizzled cowboy, a fighter pilot, and other archetypically unyielding and tough players. The sheer volume of people tends at times to dilute the book’s sense of singular storyline. Instead, this set of tales should be enjoyed with the same patience and deliberation that one might have when listening to the flowing oral histories of family members on a back porch. Like such stories, this collection is meandering at times but rich in visual detail and warm language. While not a strictly journalistic endeavor, this book will still provide readers with a comprehensive look at this rural region’s history.
A slow, sweet homage to two Midwestern towns.Pub Date: June 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6664-4
Page Count: 458
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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