A lyrical but somewhat distracted narrative that can’t decide whether it’s a love story, a meditation on our lives on this...
A gifted writer describes the ebbs and flows of the arc of a romantic relationship while exploring her own bond to the American heartland.
Bair (One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, 2000) explores her inner emotional life in this spare memoir that eventually becomes equal parts Robert James Waller romance novel, William Least Heat-Moon road show and agricultural exposé memorializing the painful legacy of the independent American farmer. The author begins with her memories of a childhood on the farm in remote Kansas. Returning home after years in metropolitan San Francisco, Bair felt like a stranger in a strange land until she met Ward, a laconic, closeted intellectual rancher who ignited a fire in this single mother. In subsequent sections, we experience Bair’s combative relationship with her son, Jake, to whom Ward represented a potential last chance at a father figure. Coming home, Bair worked with her family to preserve the large industrial farm that had become their family legacy but was faced with the harsh reality that their livelihood contributes to the rapid depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies over a quarter of America’s irrigated land with water—not to mention the fact that the farm’s fate was being decided on the eve of the ethanol boom. Bair offers an unblinking look at a woman’s place in a patriarchal culture. “A father for Jake, a farmer for Dad,” the author laments. “That’s why the time I’d spend helping Dad during Jake’s toddlerhood had seemed so healing. I had proven I could be that farmer if I wanted to, and Dad had accepted that I could. I rejected all those sexist implications, asserted my own truths, became equal in my own right, but look at me now.”
A lyrical but somewhat distracted narrative that can’t decide whether it’s a love story, a meditation on our lives on this planet or an attempt to follow Upton Sinclair into the depths.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-78604-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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