The second volume of Green's autobiography (The Green Paradise, 1992), continuing his exacting and scrupulously frank ``inner exploration''—as he recalls his often lonely adolescence in a time of war. In 1916, shy and preternaturally innocent 16-year-old Green— an American in Paris, where he'd been born (and still lives)— joined the American Field Service to fight for France. The war was to be one of the defining experiences of his long life, for while driving ambulances along the Argonne front, the sight of a dead soldier whose ``hands were almost the hands of a little boy hardly able to hold a rifle'' moved Green so much that he vowed never to kill. When he was found to be too young to be driving ambulances, he was sent home to Paris—but he soon enlisted in the American Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Near the end of the war, Green attended the French Army's artillery school and, after Armistice Day, accompanied the occupying French force to Germany. As the volume ends, he's en route to the University of Virginia, his first visit to his native land. These are the major chronological events of the book, but for Green they were only milestones in the more profound journey he was undertaking—the journey into self-discovery, sexual identity, and religious belief. Having recently converted to Catholicism, Green dreamed of becoming a monk, or at least a priest; sexually ignorant, he longed for intimacy but was uncertain how to attain it; and, deeply moral, he feared sin, though he read a risquÇ novel—which he found defiling. In the course of the narrative, his clumsy attempts at heterosexual seduction fail, and, though still innocent, he begins to realize the truth of his sexual nature—a realization, he intimates, that will provoke ``one of the most violent religious crises of his life.'' A compelling example of the examined life worth living, however painful the cost.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-7145-2969-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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