An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.
Multifaceted poet and author Braverman (Wonders of the West, 1993, etc.) renounces her native Los Angeles for rural upstate New York in a series of wry, trenchant geography lessons.
“Fusion City,” the first essay in this collection, describes the author’s upbringing as a poor welfare kid in late-1950s LA, before it became “the destination city,” famous for film and media. In a pithy pronouncement characteristically stripped of sentimentality, Braverman writes, “Our Los Angeles was where you went after divorce and scandal, bankruptcy, foreclosure, imminent starvation, bad health, and personal exile.” Subsequent chapters return to this squalid, scintillating city, but only in memory. In 1994, she fled the West Coast with her husband and teenaged daughter to live for six years in a fabulously spacious old farmhouse in the punishing snow belt at the base of the Allegheny Mountains. There, as she records in six “transmissions” to her old hometown, she reinvented herself as a gardener astonished by the change of seasons, a protector of the four deer that frequented her property in spite of hunters. “Transmission to Los Angeles #3” is a meditation on female friends who also left LA, for more fulfilling pursuits. “Escaping Los Angeles: Uncle Irving’s Advice” and “Hunting and Trapping Aunt Sarah” channel the author’s Russian-Jewish ancestors, who came to the Promised Land via Ellis Island. In “The Collective Voice of Los Angeles Speaks: Marilyn Monroe,” Braverman allows the “icon, oracle and prophet” to define the phenomenon of “personal history fusing with the sanctity of fame”; it’s the book’s least personal and satisfying piece. “P.S. House for Sale” is a longwinded, tongue-in-cheek realtor’s ad for the author’s East Coast farmhouse. Braverman now lives in San Francisco.
An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55597-438-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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