Taut memoir focusing on Wood's ``lifelong search for a life outside of killing grounds.'' Eddie Wood was everything it takes to make a serious soldier- -18, good with a gun, with a big, tough hard-drinking hero-daddy and a southern lineage going back a century, during which every generation of men bore arms. On the way to battle in WW II, however, he watched a Frenchman shave the head of a naked woman collaborator and glimpsed the face of a teenage girl who knew she would soon be raped. Sent into combat, he was badly wounded, skull and butt, in his first firefight. Here, after detailing these transformative experiences, Wood takes us over the classic American route that got him to the killing grounds, weaving old family letters, his own journals, and the sharp, clear images of his present-tense writing into an uneven but harrowing examination of pain. He doesn't flinch from the details, including his alienation from a mother who accepted war too well and a father transformed from hero to war profiteer. In plain and pointed language he gets right to the heart of the matter for him—how guns, violence and a perversely macho sexuality inescapably suffused his experience, creating the killing grounds of peace. Struggling as an unpublished writer, he slowly declined into divorce, inability to hold a job, and ever-increasing alienation—only to be reborn as a father, MIT graduate, and Washington hustler chasing power and sex down the Beltway in the 70's. All along, Wood keeps his uncompromised eye on the core of violence that he sees as tainting American life in general, and finally emerges as that rare bird, a fighting liberal. Reminiscent of Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July: a fierce, loving, brooding, sometimes awkward book that deals with difficult, unpopular themes head-on.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 1-55591-076-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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