Lacks originality or punch—recommended to readers looking for a light, unchallenging autobiography.
A pleasant but unexciting memoir of growing up Irish Catholic in New England.
Psychiatric nurse O’Hara (Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, 2004) nostalgically recounts his childhood and teenage years from the 1950s onward. The author was born in England to Irish parents, but his growing family, which would eventually include eight children, moved to Pittsfield, Mass., in 1953. The O’Haras made their home in the living quarters of their local church parish, where the author’s father worked tirelessly as a janitor and his mother was a homemaker. The staunchly Roman Catholic family was very close and worked hard. These circumstances provide the basis for this episodic memoir, in which O’Hara tells a wide range of stories touching on family, religion, parochial school and young love. He writes of his mother’s struggles with depression, which put her in the hospital more than once; of guiltily stealing dimes from the family savings jar to buy candy; and of stern nuns who warned their young students that “[l]ooking at dirty books will leave you reading the classics in braille.” He also chronicles his later teenage years, when he worked as a golf caddy, and, in a bit of a detour, his stint in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. The narrative pace is brisk, and the author maintains an unassuming, amiable tone throughout. Many of the stories are quietly amusing or nostalgic, but they’re also more than a little bland. None are laugh-out-loud funny or cut particularly deep. Readers may also get the distinct feeling that they’ve read these kinds of stories many times before—many of O’Hara’s tales of ruler-wielding Catholic-school nuns are a bit shopworn.
Lacks originality or punch—recommended to readers looking for a light, unchallenging autobiography.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1803-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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