Eccentric and a bit self-indulgent, in mellifluous prose.
Generous, evenhanded, somewhat mistitled memoir of growing up first in Omaha, then in NYC, with a peripatetic rabbi father and a disappearing mother.
With the death of his father, and nearing the end of his own sixth decade, Pulitzer-winning Lelyveld, the retired New York Times editor (How Race Is Lived in America, 2001, etc.), reflects on the dynamics of his parents’ marriage, which sparked when they were students at Columbia University, took them to Ohio, then Omaha, where his father led a congregation, then back to New York when his glamorous mother grew weary of being the wife of a midwestern Zionist rabbi and deserted her husband and two sons (then a third, by another man) to finish doctoral work in dramatic literature at Columbia. By third grade, Lelyveld had “washed up” at PS 165 on the Upper West Side, an immigrant from Omaha by way of Brooklyn, having recognized that he had “inexplicably become a burden” to his parents. Yet he is never bitter here; rather, he devotes many of his pages to a protégé of his father’s, also a rabbi, Benjamin Goldstein, a.k.a. Ben Lowell, who was the closest adult friend of Lelyveld’s boyhood, and whose shadowy life he learns about many years later, when he receives files from the FBI on a Freedom of Information request. Ben was the buddy who took Lelyveld to Columbia football games because his father, the head of the Hillel Foundation, was too busy traveling; in fact, Ben had an early career as a Communist organizer; led a congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, that subsequently ousted him when he couldn’t restrain his support for the scandalous Scottsboro boys’ cause; worked in agitprop in Hollywood; and, by 1950, got branded a “pinko rabbi” for his defense of pro-Communist front organizations. Lelyveld’s exploration of Ben’s mysterious life allows him to delve into issues dear to his own heart, yet he skirts the abandonment by his mother, whom he cannot summon anger against.
Eccentric and a bit self-indulgent, in mellifluous prose.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-22590-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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