When Donegan leaves town, we can only hope it is not to write the sequel.
Journalist and author Donegan (Maybe It Should Have Been a Three Iron, 1998) chucks his life in London and moves to
a small town in Donegal, Ireland. Donegan is a likable enough narrator. After moving into a ramshackle cottage crawling with vermin in the tiny town of Creeslough, he takes up a job at a farm, then moves on to work at a bombastic local newspaper called the Tirconaill Tribune. The paper, a tiny biweekly edited by the curmudgeonly but wonderful John McAteer, offers the true voice of the town and Donegan is quickly embraced by the locals. Though Donegan tells his tale mainly through a rambling unfurling of numerous comic episodes (including a particularly memorable one in which Newt Gingrich comes to Ireland to trace his clan heritage and is told that they have no record of his lineage), he weaves into his various yarns the account of one Bernard Lafferty—a man from Creeslough who became the butler and eventual benefactor of Doris Duke (the heiress of the Duke tobacco fortune) and was publicly accused of being Duke’s murderer. Though the story of the eccentric and reclusive Duke in her final sad years is an interesting one, Donegan discovers little about Lafferty that is of any real interest and in the end he appears as something of a red herring tossed into the narrative for no good reason. The rest of the characters are interesting, but flatly drawn: for example, we learn little of the editor McAteer apart from his gruff voice and kind sentiments, and when Donegan takes up Gaelic football, the results are predictable—he first looks foolish, then becomes good, then gives it all up to return to we don’t know what.
When Donegan leaves town, we can only hope it is not to write the sequel.Pub Date: April 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-78540-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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