Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.
Ten autobiographical essays that read more like journal entries, by the King of Grit Lit (Fay, 2000, etc.), disappointingly not up to the level of Brown’s last nonfiction collection, On Fire (1994).
The title piece, originally released in 1997 as a 40-page art edition, is the collection’s high-water mark, a richly told story about Brown’s son’s hopes of becoming a cattle-farmer in spite of a never-ending string of bad luck. (The instance detailed here involves birthing two stillborn calves.) “By the Pond,” which describes taking eight acres from which Brown fished as a young boy, fixing them up, and putting a dock in the water, is also noteworthy. “Thicker Than Blood,” short but effective, returns to Brown’s frequent subject, hunting, to tell how the older men in his small-town community initiated him into the world of hunting and its “reserves of good memories,” filling in for the father who died when he was 16 (and who didn’t hunt anyway). Brown struggles but nearly gets it right with a couple of others: “Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend,” an account of his life as a writer and Crews’s huge influence on him, and “So Much Fish, So Close to Home: an Improv,” a highly original but unfocused and awkward tale in need of editing. “Chattanooga Nights,” touching for its aw-shucks description of Brown’s first invitation to a literature conference, feels redundant after “Harry Crews” and comes embarrassingly close to self-canonization with its invocation of Eudora Welty, William Styron, Ernest Gaines, and the like. Of the collection’s final three essays, two (“Goat Songs” and “Shack”) are fine but not noteworthy, and the other (“The Whore in Me”) is uninspired.
Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.Pub Date: April 13, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-167-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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