Capably written, but cynical readers may raise an occasional eyebrow.
An English writer now in his 60s recalls his wild boyhood and his experiences in “minor seminary,” a secondary school for boys preparing to become Roman Catholic priests.
Cornwell has written previously on religious matters (Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism, 2001, etc.), and here he follows a somewhat familiar itinerary on his spiritual/religious journey: As an impoverished, troubled child, he seems slated for hell, then finds faith, loses it and later recovers it. Before leaving his family, his father bounced one low-paying job to another, as did irascible Mom. The author is well on his way to becoming a criminal (he fights, lies, fails at school), and then, most traumatically, is sexually assaulted by a stranger in a public restroom—an incident he reports only to a priest. In a waking dream, he sees Satan (“an ageless dark being”), who seems interested in the boy. Frightened, he becomes more involved in his church, and on a field trip to a priory begins to feel the call; then Jesus talks to him directly. Off he goes to Cotton Seminary (a boarding school), where he meets some classmates and at least one priest who wants to have sex with him. The boys kiss him (he likes it); the priest offers a manual inspection of his penis (he declines). But Cornwell finds a life-long friend, too, a priest who teaches English. The author battles his awakening sexual feelings throughout his school years. After graduation, he attends seminary briefly, hates it, quits, reads Darwin, becomes agnostic, heads off for undergraduate and graduate degrees at, respectively, Oxford and Cambridge. Cornwell, who says he based his memoir on “unaided personal recollections” (no diaries, etc.), remembers with remarkable clarity the daily events and conversations of a half-century ago.
Capably written, but cynical readers may raise an occasional eyebrow.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51486-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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