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GROWING UP ABSURD IN SUBURBIA

An affectionate and often incisive appraisal of the author's thoroughly peculiar yet thoroughly representative suburban Connecticut adolescence. Novelist Salzman's previous memoir, the well-received Iron and Silk (1987), told of his experiences during a two-year stint as an English teacher in China. He begins here by narrating drolly the quintessentially American way his interest in China started: At 13 he saw a kung fu movie and suddenly developed a conviction that he would become a Zen monk. He built a shrine around some chopsticks and incense, purchased a Surprise Bald Head Wig in lieu of cutting off his hair, and soon began taking kung fu lessons, in which he persisted. Salzman recalls his conflicted allegiances to several role models: his terrifying, drunken, somehow inspiring kung fu master, Sensei O'Keefe; his fellow kung fu student Michael, whose fatherless home full of delinquent brothers was the opposite of Salzman's own orderly household; and especially his father, who managed to refrain from expressing disapproval even in the face of his son's undigested Zen babble. A high school teacher persuaded Salzman to study Chinese language and culture seriously, and he wound up learning traditional landscape painting from a waiter at the local Chinese restaurant. Salzman's gentle mockery of adolescent foibles is so dead-on that he achieves Waugh-like moments of hilarity. But in the second half both the humor and the insights trail off a little: After a particularly psychotic demonstration by Sensei O'Keefe, Salzman quit kung fu, which ended his friendship with Michael. He graduated from high school a year early, smoked a lot of pot, and played jazz cello in the basement. Then he went to Yale, had bouts of fairly ordinary existential malaise, and emerged wiser. Salzman engagingly describes teen malleability and confusion; hopefully he'll immortalize his childhood next.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-679-43945-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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