A soul-searching memoir makes poetic hay of the saw that you can take the boy out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the boy. Mays's picturesque childhood on a Louisiana cotton plantation ended abruptly with his parents' deaths. He withdrew into a fantasy of ultra-Southernness and, after a mental breakdown, rejected Dixie altogether and settled in Canada, where he's the art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail. The death of Aunt Vandalia, final occupant of his childhood home, instigates a midlife quest to rediscover his southern roots. That quest leads to tidewater Virginia (where his first ancestor, an Anglican priest, arrived in 1609), to colonial South Carolina, and finally to the Deep South of Mississippi and Louisiana. The power referred to in the title (from an old gospel hymn) is paternalistic duty, a patrician sense of decorum and behavior that once made up the ``codes and tactics of Southern existence handed down, father to son'' and that persist, for Mays at least, ``at the deep levels of consciousness where the anthropological oddments of `Southern culture'. . . are irrelevant.'' Those oddments, which compose the popular conception of the South canonized and promoted by the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the burgeoning academic field of Southern studies, represent Southernness in only the narrowest sense, he convincingly argues. Mays, more interested in memory than history, seeks a broader definition. Like a graduate student deconstructing literary texts, he mines deep significance from tombstone epitaphs and family snapshots, communing dutifully with the ``genius loci'' of his ancestors' far-flung homes. The portrait of Southernness that emerges—rooted inexorably in land, classical notions of agrarian harmony, and Golden Age Greek and Roman myth and epic—is decidedly elitist, and narrow in its own right. Mays thoughtfully interprets Southern culture, but his self-absorption makes the journey less compelling as memoir than as history. (8 pages b&w photos) ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018269-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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