Generous and illuminating.
Horatio Alger meets Dorothy Allison in this debut memoir about growing up and coming out.
The author’s father, a fundamentalist minister, died during the boy’s eighth birthday party. The family had always been dirt-poor, and now his mother had to find a way to scrape by on her own. Jennings loved reading, and whenever life in his North Carolina trailer park got him down, he escaped into books. But school was a trial: He was chubby, too smart for his own good—and attracted to other boys. A scholarship to Harvard got him out of the rural South into classrooms and dorms where it was okay to be brainy and, at least in the more progressive corners of Cambridge, okay to be gay. But Jennings’s awakening didn’t end in Harvard Square. The most affecting passages here describe his experiences teaching at elite private schools in New England. His students adored him, but administrators got nervous when Jennings wanted to speak publicly about his sexual orientation. This subtle but unequivocal discrimination eventually led him to found the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which works to make schools safe for gay students. Jennings describes the evangelical, racist South in which he grew up, without a trace of condescension. His mother emerges as a heroic, working-class feminist: fighting to keep food on the table, she eventually became the first woman in the Winston-Salem area to break through the glass ceiling at McDonald’s and be promoted to manager. When Jennings came out to her, she was initially perplexed and upset. But seeing that her diffidence was driving a wedge between them, she founded a gay parents’ support group. This memoir, which ends with Jennings delivering the eulogy at his mom’s funeral, would make any mother proud.
Generous and illuminating.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8070-7146-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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