The author of Sex and Other Sacred Games (1989) and In My Mother's House (1983) gives a breathless account of a series of sexual encounters she experienced on an Israeli kibbutz in the early 1970's—of possible interest only to those who were there. Living in Berkeley with an eight-year-old daughter and a kind, generous man who goes otherwise unmentioned in this account, 31- year-old Chernin suffered periods of debilitating depression for which she could imagine only one cure—a trip to Israel, where she hoped to establish a place for herself on a border kibbutz. Arriving in a straw hat, low-cut yellow blouse, long skirt and hand-made leather sandals, Chernin steps onto the grounds of the small, experimental kibbutz—whose members number around 60 and are nearly all under 30 years old—determined to make a splash. She proves her worth the first night by washing the communal dinner dishes ``like magic.'' She then plows through a series of other jobs over the next few weeks while initiating an affair with a confused young man named Simon. Now, 20 years later, Kim Chernin (or Kim's survivor, as the author now describes herself, the original Kim having spiritually expired by now) attempts to piece together, through letters, telephone calls, and reunions with several of those who were present, what went wrong on the kibbutz. She uncovers a story of romantic deceit and intrigue revolving around an affair between Chernin and one of the kibbutz's most popular female members. Chernin's descriptions of lovesick young farm workers chasing one another round and round the grounds would have provided excellent grist for Shakespeare's comic mill, but the author, sadly, fails to see the humor. Instead, she reminisces sentimentally about those footloose days, wonders whether she could still attract her former male lover, broods briefly over her daughter's happiness, and, most passionately, searches for Kim Chernin, her long-lost inner child. Spare us.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-449-90522-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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