Further evidence that harrowing experiences do not necessarily make great art.
A hotly disputed, would-be-tear-jerking memoir, updated with a mea culpa.
In 1951, Kelley’s widowed mother was forced to leave her eight-year-old, half-Jewish daughter in the care of Catholic nuns, portrayed here as sadistic cartoons. “Don’t think that just because you’re children you can’t fall down dead at any moment,” one of them is shown telling her wide-eyed young charges. “You’ll just feel a pinprick and then you’ll be gone.” Such pronouncements are hardly uncommon in Kelly’s tediously macabre description of a tormented childhood. She extensively catalogues the physical and psychological cruelties she and her peers suffered at the hands of the nuns, interspersing flash-forwards to her attempts to make a home for herself on an Israeli kibbutz in 1972. Culminating in the drowning of Kelly’s angelic friend Frances, the memoir drags readers through a long, aggrieved account filled with one-dimensional juvenile heroes and fiendish adult villains straight out of Dickens and 101 Dalmatians, though less cleverly depicted. The more interesting material in this revised version is the defense Kelly mounts against charges of plagiarism and fabrication that surfaced after the original text became a U.K. bestseller in 2005. This U.S. edition does not contain the passages lifted wholesale from books like Jane Eyre, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Antonia White’s Frost in May, but it reprints newspaper articles detailing plagiarism the author insists was accidental, as well as letters from other orphans attesting to the veracity of her story. The apologetic introduction, which seeks to explain how a woman still grieving over her childhood found comfort and meaning in the works of more talented writers, offers Kelly’s truest and most moving prose.
Further evidence that harrowing experiences do not necessarily make great art.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7475-8714-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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