Given the downward spiral of David's brief life, we're forced to ponder whether the Libyan terrorists eventually charged...
The disturbing story of a passenger on the doomed Pan Am Flight 103, written by the victim’s younger brother, an editor for PBS’s Frontline.
Dornstein was only 19 when his 25-year-old brother David was killed in the terrorist attack over Lockerbie, Scotland. In this grim, often depressing account, the author digs deeply into his erratic brother's past, seeking not only to recreate his brother's final days, but to burrow into his mind and soul. David Dornstein was a would-be writer whose craving for fame and success far outstripped his talent, and his life had been spiraling downward even before his graduation from Brown in 1984. Although he filled notebook after notebook with his meandering, autobiographical prose, David was far better at imagining himself a successful author than in focusing on the task of becoming one. His personal life was equally troubled. Though handsome and likable, he bounced from one squalid apartment, menial job and failed relationship to the next, while his college friends moved on. When David boarded the Pan Am flight, he was on his way home from Israel, fleeing a promising relationship with an attractive woman. There's a strange, almost creepy element to Dornstein's near-obsessive pursuit of his dead brother's ghost: The author initiates a close friendship with David's former Israeli girlfriend, then later befriends—and eventually marries—his brother's college sweetheart. Dornstein's search also uncovers a childhood secret that helps to partially explain his brother's self-destructive behavior. There are powerful, chilling moments in this story: Dornstein's visit to Lockerbie, where he treads the very ground on which his brother's body fell to Earth, and his final goodbye to the rebuilt skeleton of the 747 in a remote hangar in England. Elsewhere, the narrative stalls, as the author gets buried under the rambling, unfocused writings that grew in unfinished piles in his brother's rooms. Eerily, David had often imagined himself dying young in a plane crash—he presumed it his quickest ticket to fame.
Given the downward spiral of David's brief life, we're forced to ponder whether the Libyan terrorists eventually charged with the bombing didn't spare him an even sadder end. It’s the most disturbing part of this penetrating but uneven story.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50359-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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