A meager memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simpson (In the Room We Share, 1991, etc.). Simpson's father, retrospectively cast as a kind of Prospero (the memoir's title alludes to The Tempest), was a highly successful Kingston (Jamaica) lawyer who divorced Simpson's mother, estranged himself from Simpson and his brother, and allowed his new wife effectively to disown them after his death. In the memoir's opening section, Simpson presents an unoriginal reading of Caliban and colonialism in The Tempest, which he proceeds to graft onto his experience of Jamaica's independence movement and his frustrated childhood in an unresponsive family and a beastly Anglophilic boarding school. About his experiences in Jamaica, Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge, Columbia University, and a New York publishing house, Simpson has already written at greater length and with more feeling. His latest treatments of these subjects (first published in The Hudson Review) read like dislocated stopgaps, while his essays about his later life as a poet and professor are simply pedestrian. Only one essay, ``The Vigil,'' in the book's closing section, stands out. In it, Simpson delicately balances a description of his uprooted academic routine during his mother's terminal illness with a review of her adventurous life in Russia, Jamaica, New York, and Italy. Concluding with his return to a Jamaica that has not improved with independence—its population exploding and its economy a shambles apart from tourism—Simpson finds a certain redemption in revisiting the dilapidated manor of his childhood home where squatters now live more happily than he did. Though this volume covers a lot of ground, too many of these events have already been chronicled in his essay ``The Other Jamaicans'' (in North of Jamaica, 1972) and his novel Riverside Drive (1962).
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-934257-09-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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