A bittersweet memoir of growing up absurd in rural Mississippi, then suffering the slings and arrows of marriage and fatherhood, from the popular author of such vivid fiction as Music of the Swamp (1991) and Lightning Song (1997). Deftly mingling entertaining anecdotes with probing self-analysis, Nordan creates a commendably frank revelation of the ways in which a marked tendency toward impulsive behavior has enhanced and troubled his life. The early chapters are rich in colloquial humor, portraying only-child “Buddy” Nordan’s upbringing in the nowhere Delta town of Itta Bena, where the appearance of the first local TV set causes a sensation, and the existence of racism first becomes real for Buddy once he hears stories about the notorious Emmett Till murder case (later the subject of Nordan’s fine novel Wolf Whistle, 1993). There are further ominous foreshadowings in the irreversibly depressed figure of Buddy’s mild-mannered alcoholic stepfather, and in scattershot intimations of the preadolescent Lewis’s seemingly interconnected obsession with sex, frequent irrational anger, and fascination with violence (hence his title). Generic accounts of young-adult high jinks (like locking himself out of a hotel room while drunk and naked) occupy the book’s meandering midsection, but are succeeded by increasingly candid descriptions of recovering from a nearly fatal automobile accident (in which the other driver was killed, as Nordan learned when the man’s widow unaccountably visited him in the hospital), a promising first marriage that ended in divorce, “the enormity of . . . [his eldest] son’s suicide” (provoked, Nordan realized, by his own alcoholism, infidelity, and parental failure), and his successful remarriage, literary career, and peacemaking with both his own demons and the erosions of aging. Some painful truth telling, and an eye-opening explanation of how one writer’s complicated psyche came to be, in a worthy piece of personal history that’s also a helpful gloss on Nordan’s distinctive novels and stories. (First serial to Harper’s and Oxford American)
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2000
ISBN: 1-56512-199-6
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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