While references to sexual acts, male anatomy, and drug use may put off some readers, most who either recall or are curious...
Fundraising adviser Cove recalls with humor and understanding a pivotal year in the life of his family.
The first-time author was 12 in 1978 when his family moved from Manhattan to Salem, Massachusetts. This was his eighth move, so he quickly settled into the routine of new friends, potential girlfriends, bar mitzvah preparation, the practice of storing undelivered newspapers from his paper route in his closet, and living in a dilapidated if historic house from whose sloping roof he could see the ocean and smoke whatever substances he could procure. Into this scene arrived one of his father’s old California hippie friends, Howie, and his new wife, Carly. Howie, at first planning to stay just a couple weeks, hung around for months and, at a big Thanksgiving dinner, made an impression by hauling out a new issue of Playgirl in which he was the centerfold. Howie decided that his next step up the career ladder would be to earn the title of Playgirl’s “Man of the Year,” and he enlisted Cove to be his campaign organizer in reaching out to the reluctant residents of Salem. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the marriage of the author’s parents was quietly, and then not so quietly, unraveling. Cove has a light touch and an eye for regional and temporal detail, and if some of his anecdotes appear to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, he never comes across as self-aggrandizing. His pains and pleasures have been tempered by the decades, and the book clearly conveys both his disappointment with his parents at the time and the ways the years since have shaped his forgiveness and appreciation of them.
While references to sexual acts, male anatomy, and drug use may put off some readers, most who either recall or are curious about this free-loving period of history will find themselves satisfied by Cove’s re-creation of his journey out of boyhood.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12396-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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