A bittersweet portrait of the artist as a young homosexual, coming to terms with his parents and finding that “the thing that harms turns out, sometimes, to be the very thing that restores.” After writing through the death of his lover in his previous memoir, Heaven’s Coast (1996), poet Mark Doty uses the visual tricks of a 17th-century Dutch perspective box as a metaphors for a series of linked autobiographical essays. In the same way the box distorts finely modeled objects so that they appear in perspective when viewed through a lens, so does Doty hope to bring order to the uncertain memories and unresolved emotional turmoil of a peripatetic middle-class youth in the “50s and early “60s, when his temperamental father built missile silos in the Arizona desert while his prodigal sister spent time in jail, his mother drank herself to death, and the incipient poet found aesthetic ecstasy dancing to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Doty is most sympathetic this world’s eccentrics, misfits, and social rebels, from his mother’s meditating art teacher to the nameless gnome of Moon Valley, a Tucson hermit whose fantastic desert playground remains hidden among the city’s suburban sprawl, and finally to Doty’s sister Sally, who, after her Jesus-freak husband takes off with a younger girl in the church choir, avenges herself on the male world as a pocket-picking prostitute, only to straighten up and fly right after finding a true gentleman in a bar. There’s the standard sexual squirming, trite conformity, and barely repressed violence common to Eisenhower-era bildungsromans, as well as a beautifully balanced take on Doty’s mother’s unfulfilled life. All that, and some hilarious, Harvey Fierstein pratfalls in which Doty figures out that he’s gay, relieve Doty’s naval-gazing discursions on art, writing, and the making of a poet. A short, effusive, and wisely compassionate backward glance on a life that, while less than the sum of its parts, has healed as much as it has hurt.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019374-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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