A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.
Fearless foreign correspondent buys a fixer-upper in a different kind of war zone: West Harlem.
For two decades, Matloff (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; Fragments of a Forgotten War, 1997) was a restlessly globetrotting, danger-hunting reporter. In April 2000, she decided to put down roots. With her Dutch husband John, also a roving writer, she purchased a once-beautiful building between Broadway and Amsterdam in the West 140s in Manhattan. Matloff says that the neighborhood seemed even less safe than when she visited her first boyfriend there back in the crime-plagued late-’70s. Her street was an open-air drug market. The manic crack addict squatting next door continually threatened her, claiming that the house was actually his. The dozens of nearby “nail salons” and “shoe stores” were actually money-laundering fronts for cash being sent back home; most of the neighborhood came from the same village in the Dominican Republic. Blessed with a knack for making friends (the years on assignment in Latin America helped, too), the author was quickly on good terms with a grumpy caretaker and a refined, Latin-quoting addict; she even struck a deal with the drug crew’s boss to keep his guys off her property. She and John supervised an ill-assorted gang of renovators: The Mexican mocked the Honduran who in turn derided the Dominicans. Matloff, raised in a liberal Jewish family, was almost as surprised by their unembarrassed battling along ethnic lines as she was by the animosity black neighborhood activists displayed toward the local Dominicans. The author avoids nonfiction chick-lit cliché, even when describing such milestones as 9/11 or her pregnancy; her journalistic curiosity and lightly self-deprecating touch keep the book from becoming an uptown safari for the Elle Decor set. She rarely focuses on herself or even the house, but rather on her thrilling, problem-plagued neighborhood, colorfully portrayed in terms that are neither frightened nor naïve.
A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.Pub Date: June 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6526-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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