A literary memoir of purest sense and sensitivity.
The highly crafted first installment of a projected three-volume memoir from one of the most respected and least known voices in American letters.
“I’m trying to write a memoir that gets beneath the self-consciousness of self,” Woiwode (Indian Affairs, 1992, etc.) writes in the opening pages his story. First, he narrates the rigors of a particularly harsh recent winter at his home in North Dakota, followed by a brief chapter that addresses spiritual matters. Then he shifts back to his academic career at the University of Illinois and the considerable success he enjoyed in the theater before he found his voice as a writer and his path to New York, where with encouragement from William Maxwell at the New Yorker he developed and published his first fiction. In his account, Woiwode breaks through the foreground—interrupting the present with the past, or vice versa—to establish a secondary narrative thread. He depicts all action in the present tense throughout, cutting back and forth between “then” and “now” with the abruptness of film montage. Although the technique takes getting used to, each narrative develops distinctively and richly in theme and character; no matter how suddenly he leaves and returns from one “time” to the other, the book unfolds with sure control and clarity. He turns his gaze on the figures in his life—his family, his friends (including the young Robert DeNiro), his teachers (Maxwell especially), and himself—with the honesty and unconditional love that his mentor tells him writers must have. His affection for (and obligation to) Maxwell emerges with little sentimentality; the larger themes—loss, struggle, and love—become powerful through the virtues of language and insight as pure and sharp as the air on a clear December morning. At times that air gets a bit rarefied, but the rewards are worth the risk.
A literary memoir of purest sense and sensitivity.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-07848-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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