A compact, generous entry into the comic sensibility of a thoughtful, adventurous life.
Mark Twain’s life and times, in his own words, through memoir and essay.
Piggybacking the 2010 publication of the first volume of the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, this Penguin collection—edited by Twain scholar Rasmussen (Bloom's How to Write about Mark Twain, 2007, etc.)—offers an interesting alternate route to the great man’s life: the condensed memoirs published in his lifetime, along with numerous personal essays. Together they reveal a raconteur who saw life as an endless comedy and a frequent tragedy. Twain’s autobiography, dictated a few years before his death, shows his effortless genius for talk, whether he’s recounting a near-fatal dueling episode, how he aided a traveling mesmerist in conning an audience or how even America’s Greatest Humorist could bomb before an audience at a literary dinner. Death is also much on his mind. The book is dominated by the memory of his late daughter Susy, who died at 24 from spinal meningitis, and left behind a charming memoir of “Papa,” written when she was 14. Susy—“a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sandpaper on me”—becomes the gateway through which Twain recalls the past and the prism through which he views mortality. In other autobiographical pieces, he recalls how he mastered the Mississippi after a slow and humiliating steamboat apprenticeship: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.” He also addresses his disappointed ambitions, the art of turkey hunting, his (largely discredited) doubts on Shakespeare’s authorship, how his views on slavery changed and how life is a matter of fortunate circumstance.
A compact, generous entry into the comic sensibility of a thoughtful, adventurous life.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-14-310667-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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