A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.
The sad, instructive saga of a boy hanged in 1892 for a double homicide he committed at age 15.
Brumberg (The Body Project, 1997, etc.) has sunk her spade into a mother lode of information about the alarming case of Charles Miller, an almost archetypal orphan born in 1874 in New York City to a mother who died of consumption when he was five and an alcoholic father who committed suicide. Charley and his three siblings entered the New York Orphan Asylum, where he suffered the humiliation of chronic bedwetting, a condition that did not endear him to the families who took him in. He bounced from one abusive situation to another until he ran off to hop trains. Adopting the moniker “Kansas Charley” (he’d lived briefly in the Cyclone State), the boy learned firsthand the roughness of the road when he was gang-raped by some older men. Later, in Wyoming, he ran into two better-off young men, Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh, heading west for fun and adventure. They had some kind of falling-out (over alcohol? sex? class conflict?), and one morning while the other two were sleeping, Charley shot and hurriedly robbed them both. Later, penitent, he surrendered in Kansas and was returned to Cheyenne, where he endured a long incarceration (twice escaping), a sensational trial, failed appeals, brief celebrity (his jailers gave the press virtually free access, and he penned his own accounts, sometimes in pathetic verse), and death by hanging before 60 witnesses. Brumberg (Women’s Studies/Cornell) appends a chapter containing familiar arguments against executing juveniles, including some cautionary words about such contemporary incidents as the Columbine shootings and the DC sniper attacks. Authorial clichés—twice the case reminds her of a hot potato—and an overall lack of craft diminish the narrative’s power.
A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03228-X
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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