A fond reminiscence of a man’s coming-of-age summer working as a firewatcher in the Montana Rockies.
Greene seemed to always have a love of the outdoors. But after the watershed summer of 1943, he devoted his life to nature, becoming an esteemed biology professor, director of an educational nature center and president of the American Nature Study Society. The foundation for this impressive life was laid when he was a wide-eyed 16-year-old on a journey to the unexplored spaces of northwestern Montana. There, far away from his home in suburban Philadelphia, he planned to work on a trail maintenance crew and gain a Thoreauvian appreciation of life. Cabinet National Forest was a desolate, uninhabited and supremely beautiful place—but also terrifying at times, particularly to a teenager. Like any great journey, the summer was not without its ups and downs. Greene switched crews several times in the first weeks and experienced homesickness and longing for his girlfriend more than 3,000 miles away. What lay ahead, however, would prove to be the most challenging. Within a week of beginning his sojourn as the solitary firewatcher atop Berray Mountain, Greene had several near-breakdowns. In one suspenseful, touching scene, he flees down the mountain, unable to bear the loneliness of his station, seeking civilization or human contact in any form. A wise ranger calms him with a stern lesson, and from there, Greene is a changed man. Through it all—or at least through the retelling of it—Greene maintains a humility, sense of humor and earnestness that is wholly appealing and endearing. The story itself is well written and steady, and some of the most enjoyable sections are the author’s open, honest analysis of his younger self’s less attractive emotions. Most importantly, this is no sad, elegiac memoir; instead, it’s a man toasting his youth and celebrating life with the same vitality he earned so many summers ago. An excellent memoir for those who have experienced the wonder of open Western space, or the delayed rush of maturity.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1618630001
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Bookstand
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
