These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have...
Fast-track editor Alexander downshifts to the back-road life of a Maine farmer, though he keeps his journalist’s pen busy.
As a young showbiz editor at Variety and People, he already possessed considerable personal insight: “I was apprenticing to be an asshole.” So Alexander and his family upped and moved north to Maine and a farm that had seen better times. Short descriptions of his days, originally published in the Portland Phoenix, range over subjects from burning the blueberry patch to contra dancing. The author is the proverbial rube in the land of hardscrabble survivors, picking up scraps of wisdom, though he feels he will never be accepted. Yet, between magazine assignments (which come in an enviable horn of plenty), Alexander works hard at connecting with his new home; he might forget to engage the mower blades when cutting—or, rather, not cutting—the lawn, but he will also plant and sow, fight the good fight against a strip-mine proposal, and even run for selectman, an act of considerable jeopardy to his ego. At times he can be sanctimonious (“Farmers also go to college these days. The nation’s agricultural schools, supported heavily by agribusiness, teach them how to be profitable [but] there’s no textbook on how to hose out the sheep shed without disturbing the robin’s nest”), but he can also admit his inadequacies. The citizenry keep him up to speed, whether it’s the “septic analyst” who advises a new system after he “noticed some black gunk oozing up from the ground. It was crude but definitely not oil,” or the neighbor who counsels him to simply accept his primitive wood-and-gas stove. “My mother had one of those stoves,” says Ken. “Sure, every now and then she’d blow the doors off the house, but who gives a shit?”
These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have an enduring simplicity and allure.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1412-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
