Another well-written but tiresomely narcissistic voyage of self-discovery.
Finding it difficult to commit, a journalist in her 30s spends a summer driving down the East Coast while she recalls past loves and ponders present options.
Wright is an accomplished writer (New York Times, Baltimore Sun, etc.), and she vividly describes her encounters with colorful characters en route. But the details of her personal relationships—the sex, her herpes infection, the men themselves—often make for queasy reading. Attending graduate journalism courses in New York, she feels torn between old love Stuart, a veterinarian whose dog Brando briefly accompanies her, and new swain Peter, a writer. Panicked by her inability to choose, she decides to travel alone for the summer. Wright hopes that by revisiting her past and reflecting on her present situation she will reach a decision. Beginning in Maine, she moves to New Hampshire and there decides to include in her itinerary places like Nantucket, where she had a summer fling with a waiter, and Greenwich, Connecticut, where she spent weekends with her wealthy beau Dodge, a Wall Street banker. She meets people like recently divorced Carl, who asks her where love goes when a marriage breaks down, and South Carolina fisherman Troy, who takes her shrimping off Edisto Island. She also recalls the other men in her life. While working in Colorado, Wright had three suitors vying for her affections. Describing her grandparents’ marriage as well as that of her parents, she wonders whether her inability to commit is similar to her father’s debilitating claustrophobia. But finally, while swimming in Key West, she has a defining epiphany that makes the whole adventure worthwhile. It all seems strained, and sometimes as irrelevant as her grandfather’s comments on love and marriage that preface each section.
Another well-written but tiresomely narcissistic voyage of self-discovery.Pub Date: June 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1003-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
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