White (Death by Decree, 1981, etc.; English/Univ. of Tenn.) takes a loving look at his boyhood home and comes up proud to be a Welshman. Born in Cardiff in 1924, and educated in English schools and universities in the 1930's and 40's, White views his Welsh nature and English nurture as a source of strength, providing a happy blend of romance and reality. At age 64, he makes a pilgrimage to his native land, quite possibly his last visit, and shares the thoughts and memories evoked by what he finds there. A good deal of Welsh history, from the Bronze Age on, is thrown in to give the reader the right perspective on matters Welsh, but primarily the story is a personal one—White's recollections of his now- dead parents and his uncles and aunts, his remembrances of old friends and mentors, his anguish over the present plight of his invalid wife back in America, and his regrets and satisfactions in the face of the changes—and sometimes the lack of change—he finds in Cardiff and the other places he journeys to. ``Journeying'' is an appropriate title term, for the text wanders about rather freely as White discourses on whatever pleases him. At times he goes off track, as when he inexplicably devotes a lengthy section to a discussion of the rigors of American football; perhaps the untamed Welsh side of his nature occasionally takes the upper hand, and the rational English side temporarily loses control over his whims. An engaging and personal look into the past of a man who may not yet have come to terms with himself—but who at least is clear about his love for his homeland.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1991
ISBN: 0-87113-460-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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