Compact and well-executed.
Elliptical memoir depicting a girlhood of deception and gradually receding naïveté.
Poet Lederer captures in deliberate, observant prose a gradually deteriorating middle-class life in the 1970s and ’80s, noting that “what I relished was the togetherness that came with total family conflict.” The youngest child in a competitive intellectual clan that seemed closest during card games, she felt perpetually outsmarted by her savvy, distant brother and sister, fearful of the conflicts between her rigid teetotaler father and her alcoholic mother. (They eventually separated; later, her father achieved fortune with the Anguished English series.) Her brother Howard left home early. His first year as a New York gambler was a sordid disaster—for such individuals, Lederer notes, luck “resembles nothing more than a mangled version of hope”—but he eventually rose to the upper echelon of professional poker players, as did her “preternaturally vicious” sister. The comparatively conservative Katy attended prep school and Berkeley; then, intimidated by her literary ambitions, she apprenticed herself to Howard as a poker player, her volatile mother having previously joined his quasi-legal bookmaking operation, and in a scheme to start a glossy magazine, PokerWorld. Her narrative captures both the sleazy underground gambling milieu and the glossy allure of the high-roller scene at top Las Vegas casinos. Despite Howard’s guarded approval, poker denizens warn Katy away from the lifestyle; “you can make something better than this,” says one. Wearied, she heeds this advice, enrolling at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as Howard’s operations are shut down by the Las Vegas police for being part of “a $400-million-a-year illegal sports betting network.” Lederer’s meditation on family and chance is finely written, yet suffers from a curious stasis: by the conclusion, Howard’s legal troubles have evaporated, and her kin have returned to the world of high-stakes gaming. She perceives the past with acuity, but arrives at only modest personal judgments.
Compact and well-executed.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60898-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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