Jerome reports that memory, routine, and even sleep are among the compensatory pleasures of old age (when even sex can be...
Sagacious and entertaining field notes on a canoe trip into the cold waters of old age.
In this memoir of 12 chapters named by months, consciously patterned after Thoreau, Jerome (Blue Rooms, 1997; The Writing Trade, 1991; etc.) makes good use of his extensive background in advertising, athletics, and magazine writing. On turning 65, the author plans to rent a dumpster for “clearing out the trash of youth . . . as if preparing for a move.” Beyond removing the clutter of younger projects and disposing of the effluvia acquired in the course of a life spent in the media, Jerome needs to space out his time. Movement is slower with the hyper-gravity of “geezerhood,” though Jerome fights to jog and swim despite the bulging disks in his vertebra. After the shock of reaching the age of retirement (“How can we use up a whole tube of toothpaste when we use it in such little dibs and dabs?”), the veteran realizes he’s in for the fight of his life—for the duration. Jerome has wise phrases about aging and mortality as a human process, and wisecracks about discovering his remarkable talent for sitting still. Jerome displays much awareness of the biology of aging—of the muscles, tissues, bones, nerves, and cells of our inexorable entropy. He calls it unfair that so many more of our neurons convey pain than pleasure. He mocks himself as Languid Man, as someone the cyber age has passed by. He jokes about spring being an itchy time even without a brace on his neck, but gamely goes on challenging canoe expeditions.
Jerome reports that memory, routine, and even sleep are among the compensatory pleasures of old age (when even sex can be slow and tender). The insights, courage, and humor of this memoir create a wake that younger paddlers could follow.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50056-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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