Both elegant and elegiac—vintage Woiwode.
Poet and novelist Woiwode (My Dinner with Auden, 2007, etc.) ponders matters of life, death and what lies between.
The author used to be a resident of Manhattan, writing for William Maxwell at the New Yorker and enjoying big-city life until, one day, he “read in the New York Times that breathing the city air was equal to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, at a time when I was up to two myself.” Country life beckoned, first East and then way out West, in the scarcely inhabited wilds of western North Dakota, where he is now poet laureate and where, tending to a dozen or so horses and a bunch of cats, he grows enough wheat, he notes with satisfaction, to feed a few thousand people. He is possibly the only Dakota wheat farmer to quote punk goddess Patti Smith in defense of farming, and he is among the few writers of the present age who knows how to grow pasta—no minor thing. And no more dirty air: Now death stalks him in a different guise, hiding, say, in the gears of a tractor’s power takeoff. Death is a fact of life, and not just out on the farm: This gentle memoir sets out from the author’s vantage of a vigorous 63 years (“a year older than my father when he died”) and weaves its way across the decades, often calling on the now departed. Woiwode directly addresses his son throughout, a young man who had his own bad tangle with a tractor but made it through, only to go on to fly helicopters in Iraq. The device sometimes seems an afterthought, but the finely honed meditations are not: “I imagine death as a . . . stepping down to levels of loss, but death is an end, not the continuing dispersal I’m contending with.”
Both elegant and elegiac—vintage Woiwode.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58243-373-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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