More good-natured memoirs from the king of chat. King (Tell Me More, 1990, etc.) rules the live airwaves these days. Here, he gives a clue to his success, saying ``I was always...Immediate Gratification King. It's why I love doing live radio and live television.'' It's also why he loves Brooklyn, the subject of these boyhood memoirs. King (born in 1933) was raised there in a Jewish-and-Italian neighborhood where the pursuit of pleasure was the name of the game. Food was ``a religious experience''—miraculous chocolate egg-creams, heavenly blintzes (``eat six or seven, then get right in your car and drive to the hospital for your heart attack''). Adventures with a teenage gang made way for girl-chasing and amateur theatrics. Working one summer in the Catskills, King ``got laid...on home plate at the Grossinger's softball field''; back in Bensonhurst, he matched muscles in a street-corner contest with another local Jewish boy, future Dodger superstar Sandy Koufax. Life revolved around family (lots of eccentric relatives here), sports, and, increasingly, the magic of radio. King imagines what it would have been like to be on CNN back in those days (from a fantasy interview with Hitler: ``It vas the people of Poland who called for us''). Happy memories notwithstanding, times were tough: King's father died young, and his mother went on welfare and worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop. King's prospects seemed gloomy. He was a terrible student, graduating high school with a 66 average; only his chutzpah and good will, both enormous, pulled him through. King concludes with a nostalgic visit to his childhood haunts. Murray the Barber is gone, so is Maltz's Candy Store; the neighborhood is sliding downhill. But still ``those inanimate objects were breathing that weekend, whispering memories to me, making my life full''—and making this reminiscence a warmhearted winner.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-49356-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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