From New York Times editorial-board member and veteran columnist Cantwell, a memoir of growing up during the 1930's and 40's in the town of Bristol, New Hampshire. ``I have come down with the Bristol Complaint,'' Cantwell announces early in the book: ``People who have the Bristol Complaint can never leave town. The elm trees snag them. So does the harbor and the wild roses and the history.'' Cantwell does, of course, manage to leave town, but the town remains inside her, and, here, she brings it to her readers all the way back from its history of colonial immigrants and traders, of General LaFayette (who once camped there, but left when winter set in) and of ``Philip, King of the Wampanoags'' (the bones of whose people lie under the ground)—and on through the lives of her beloved grandparents, known as Ganny and Gampy (she still believes Gampy was once a bootlegger); of her own parents, Leo Cantwell and Mary Lonergan; and thus to the birth and growing up of Mary Lee Cantwell and her younger sister, Diana. Seldom have a town and its memoirist been more perfectly blended than they are here (``It was as if Bristol were a book I couldn't put down,'' says the author), and in her subtle and delicately told tales of being a young child, of getting polio, of remembering WW II, of learning the stark cruelties of social class, of struggling into adolescence, of finally graduating from high school and getting ready to leave home—in all of these, Cantwell embraces sentiment without ever becoming sentimental, and makes her words fall into place with a quiet perfection. ``If I don't get out of Bristol it will always be three o'clock in the afternoon,'' she says; and yet, even so, amid much, much more, she remembers for us a long-ago afternoon with her high-school girlfriends when ``we walked through air that was as silver as the bay.'' Evocative, lovely, deeply felt, and mature personal writing about a past that's gone.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57502-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
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