Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.
A lyrical memoir of country life, and a requiem, of sorts, for one of the last best places.
Story-writer Rember (English/Albertson Coll.; Cheerleaders from Gomorrah, 1994, etc.) opens his narrative with an invitingly well-handled anecdote from his youth involving a chance encounter with Ernest Hemingway on a snowy Idaho lane. It ends sadly, as indeed did Hemingway’s life, but also with a matter-of-fact simplicity that perfectly fits its rural setting: tragic though it may be, life goes on, and so do our stories. Now in his early 50s, Rember weaves past and present, dropping in here to recall his trapper/fishing-guide father’s efforts to carve a living out of wilderness, there to ponder what became of that wilderness once the word got out to Hollywood that the skiing there was good and the people compliant; among the sometimes spectral characters who figure in his pages are a dissatisfied banker friend who is forever trying to convert Rember to the cause of making money; another friend who, having suffered a brain injury in a climbing accident, slowly rebuilds his memories and skills; and a student with a “not-very-good brain” who, before Rember’s eyes, ruins a car that cost well more than he earns in a year. From these and other figures fine and flawed, Rember draws moral lessons rendered in nicely epigrammatic, often humorous turns: “I had learned that the magic can fall out of things and that you can be involved in rites of passage that turn out to be all about somebody else.” “Bliss, Idaho, is just like Saudi Arabia. . . . Except in Bliss, the wind blows harder and the people aren’t any fun.”
Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42207-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
SEEN & HEARD
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