Absorbing reminiscence of a heart in disintegration. Senior Time writer Morrow (Fishing in the Tiber, 1988, etc.) suffered his first heart attack at the age of 36. His second came 17 years later, and it is this insult to the body that he recounts here. He describes in such frightening detail the trajectory of a heart attack's passage through the body that the reader has to set the book down from time to time and take a deep, reassuring breath. His picture of recovery is less scary but just as affecting, as he remembers ``eternities of ceiling timestaring, thinking. In New York Hospital, I lay hour after hour in the passive patient's twilight, learning to accept the needles and tubes and noises and light.'' Thankfully, Morrow never slides into bathos or self-pity. Quite the opposite: He is often angry at himself for the weakness of his heart muscle, recalling, ``I blame myself. I rant at myself,'' but catching himself by noting, ``This is not an intelligent way to get well.'' During his recovery, Morrow remembers bits and pieces of his life: his hard-working, hard- drinking journalist parents; his travels into hellish places like Bosnia, where a Serbian concentration-camp commandant barks, ``I am a humanist!''; his youthful efforts at reiterating his hero Ernest Hemingway's path. Morrow's well-wrought reflections on these episodes of a life interestingly lived, miniature essays in themselves, stand like islands in the streams of consciousness that this memoir often assumes. And fine islands they are, full of memorable lines: ``I have seen it call forth too many slurred stupidities to buy the sophomoric lines, In vino veritas.'' ``Leave the hatred to those who need it.'' These and other sharp-edged reflections make us glad that Morrow is still with usand that he has given us yet another fine book.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51870-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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