A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their...
Children’s nonfiction author Wilker (Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Sports Gambling, 2000, etc.) relates his life story through the lens of baseball-card collecting and his worship of his older brother.
Because the author’s mother wanted to live a simple, rural life, she left her husband to live with a free-spirited man in Vermont. Finding it difficult to make friends, Wilker created a fantasy life built around the baseball cards that he bought in bubble-gum packs. His more athletic, outgoing older brother sometimes participated in the baseball-card fantasy, but other times showed no interest. As Wilker’s hobby grew, he began to relate less to the star players than to the fringe players—Kurt Bevacqua, Herb Washington, David Clyde, etc.—who bounced between the major and minor leagues or stayed in the majors through persistence and luck more than skill. A fan of the Boston Red Sox, Wilker became emotionally attached to one All-Star, Carl Yastrzemski, but never dared to hope that Yaz would ever notice. Even into adulthood, the author drifted and sometimes depended on illegal narcotics to get through the days. He looked to his brother, his mother, her boyfriend and, eventually, to his biological father for affirmation, but found it only sporadically. Nearing 40, Wilker finally began to pull his life together. His transformation was partly due to the long-time frustrated Red Sox finally capturing a championship, but mainly because he met the soul mate who became his wife, settled in Chicago, made a kind of peace with each of his biological parents and rebonded with his brother.
A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their psychological hold on the author.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934734-16-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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