Unusual, worthy of consideration, and admirable for the spiritual questions it raises.
Charming, thoughtful debut memoir of a Baptist adolescent’s drift towards earthly temptation.
As Anderson (Writing/Univ. of Minnesota General College) tells it, his years as a drummer, record-store clerk, and all-around secular slacker in the Minneapolis music scene sharply contrasted with his earlier life as an evangelical minister’s son who was exhorted to live “in the world, but not of it.” Young Mark aspired to the sanctity expected of the pastor’s family, yet was fascinated by what his disapproving parents termed “jazzy music”: rock ’n’ roll from Elvis onward. He was further confused in the early 1970s by the “Jesus Movement,” which sought to fuse the spiritual highs of born-again Christianity with the earthly trappings of the counterculture. Anderson watched Billy Graham’s “Explo ’72” on TV (“It was so me, so where I wanted to be”) and was entranced by itinerant longhaired Jesus freaks, whose tales of accepting Christ were backed by guitar and drums. His fervor made his teenage transgressions complex and poignant: he and his friends smoked pot, drank, and engaged in marathon heavy petting at their strict Baptist summer camp, knowing they’d return to the true path from such backsliding. Strangely, Anderson backslid less once his father was transferred to California, where he fell in with some fundamentalist surfer-boys. Yet later, he became alienated from the faith’s severe dichotomy between sinners and the saved, demonstrated at a 1990s reunion when one friend castigated him for his sister’s insufficiently Christ-centered wedding. Anderson effectively employs a quiet Midwestern humor; his understanding of how transient pop culture can affect personal watersheds reinforces his incremental portrait of a young rocker tempted and transformed. Deeply concerned with discerning larger communities, his narrative is solidly rather than flashily written. While the slow pace may put off some readers, others will find genuine insight in the author’s bemused grappling over time with his strict childhood faith.
Unusual, worthy of consideration, and admirable for the spiritual questions it raises.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8203-2554-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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