Close to home and heart, this portrait of the artist shows Queenan at the top of his form—his best yet.
The waggish blue-collar Philly scribe (Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, 2004, etc.) ornaments his tough-childhood memoir with the sort of fancy writing natural to authors of Hibernian extraction.
The Queenan family, never in the chips, had a hardscrabble life in the scruffy Irish-American precincts of the City of Brotherly Love. Love was scant. Mom was a terrible cook, and Father was a terrible drunk. The youngster’s life was one of ongoing deprivation and off-brand merchandise in various tatterdemalion parishes. Queenan and his sisters couldn’t wait to vacate their hostile family encampments on the wrong side of the Schuylkill River. At 13, the besieged lad believed he had an ecclesiastical vocation, but after one year at Maryknoll Junior Seminary he abandoned the cloth. So it was on to Catholic high school, then a Catholic college. He found surrogate fathers, first in a colorful dry-goods merchant who ran a kind of urban emporium, replete with picaresque clientele, next in an oddball apothecary. Further forming his persona were various part-time jobs, including the midnight shift at a bubblegum mill. Scrambling out of the proletariat, Queenan discovered art, music and Paris. He became a man of letters, but even after he achieved his dream (“to make a living by ridiculing people”) he was still haunted by a lifelong enemy—his father. Queenan père, his son recounts, was brutal and mean, no credit to any 12-step program. The text, mostly credible, is naturally infused with the Celtic gift of gab, garnished with grand displays of highfalutin lexicon. Loquacious and rococo, it is populated by congresses of poltroons and excoriates many mangy nincompoops. Evidently Queenan resorts to his venerable thesaurus in an attempt to channel that heathen Mencken’s lexical cantrips. Fortunately, the adverbial and adjectival antics work, and the flashes of characteristic caustic wit are accompanied by some truly sweet spots.
Close to home and heart, this portrait of the artist shows Queenan at the top of his form—his best yet.Pub Date: April 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02063-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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