Gentle and lucid—a welcome change from the polemical tone of so many books on the matter (or antimatter, if you like) of the...
Life’s a bichon, and then you die.
Elegant and eloquent, Barnes (Arthur & George, 2006, etc.) arrives a touch belatedly on a well-worked scene: namely, English writers pondering and arguing the existence or nonexistence of God. Barnes inclines toward the golden mean: “I don’t believe in God,” he writes, “but I miss Him.” He was once more inclined to the atheism of Hitchens, Dawkins et al., but now, 62 years on, he admits to less certainty and “more awareness of ignorance,” to say nothing of a growing understanding that the good times on this side of the grass are finite. On that point, one of this slim memoir’s finest moments is a vignette of just a couple of paragraphs about disposing of his recently deceased parents’ stuff, sending some of it off to the consignment shop, some to the recycling center and shamefacedly tossing the rest and feeling a little queasy in the bargain, “as if I had buried my parents in a paper bag rather than a proper coffin.” All this musing on death and the divine makes Pascal’s wager an ever more attractive proposition, even if Barnes readily recognizes that one of the most powerful impulses for religion is the knowledge—and consequent dread—of death, the great divide in life being between those who fear the end and those who do not. Rambling along amiably, the author stops to look in on some famous last words—Hegel’s, for one, who said before expiring, “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.” Barnes also composes a lovely, oh-so-English self-effacing obituary for himself, confessing to a love of love, friendship, books and the wine bottle. He ends with a meditation on how that obituary might be occasioned, though the reader will hope that he proves right in reckoning himself only three-fourths of the way down the walk toward the light.
Gentle and lucid—a welcome change from the polemical tone of so many books on the matter (or antimatter, if you like) of the big guy upstairs.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26963-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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