Having had an eventful decade since his acclaimed The Ragman's Son, it's small wonder that this successful novelist-actor returns to the memoir form. In the last ten years, Douglas has been in a near-fatal helicopter crash, suffered a stroke, won a long-deserved Oscar (for career achievement), and rediscovered his Jewish roots. The trigger for the deep thinking that this book apparently represents is a midair collision between a helicopter carrying Douglas and Noel Blanc (Mel's son) and a plane whose two occupants were killed. Douglas understandably found himself asking why he and Blanc survived while the two younger men died. This, in turn, led to reflections on other brushes with death. A trip to Israel and a meeting with a dynamic Orthodox rabbi drove the actor into a prolonged, ongoing examination of Judaism, the religion into which he was born but which he had shunned since adolescence. Much of this volume is taken up with his pleasure in rediscovering the stories of the Torah and re-evaluating his own understanding of Jewish thought. Unfortunately, the emotional openness and intensity that made Douglas a great actor and a satisfying memoirist in the earlier volume are ill-suited to the field of intellectual argument. His almost boyish enthusiasm is sometimes entertaining but more often grating, and on the whole, the book does an unintentional disservice to the elegance and subtlety of Jewish theology. The result is often embarrassing in its chauvinism and its clichÇ-riddled recountings of Bible stories. Douglas also displays—in at least one instance—a slavish adherence to the Likud Party line on recent events in Israel. Readers looking for more of the candor of The Ragman's Son will find it, but this is a deeply disappointing book. (50 photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84415-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
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