One grumpy old man and his grandson—rated N for nostalgic and, finally, T for tragic. To readers who don't share Apple's (The Propheteers, 1987) affection, his grandfather Rocky (nÇ Yerachmiel) might best be described by his own favorite epithet: ``son of a beetch.'' From his childhood in Grand Rapids, Mich., through his graduate school days in Ann Arbor, to his years as a husband, father, and college professor in Houston, Apple's beloved ``roommate'' was his ornery grandfather. Rocky has his touching, and humorous, points: The lifelong baker continues his art even after passing 100 years of age; an Orthodox Jew, he caringly ushers a young seeker into Judaism; he accompanies Max and his girlfriend, Debby, on a comical mission to recover Debby's shanghaied dog. But Rocky is also a master of emotional blackmail; confronted with Debby's moving into the Ann Arbor apartment, he says, ``If I wanted to live in a whorehouse, I could have stayed in Grand Rapids.'' Much of Apple's narrative is an ongoing cycle of battles and reconciliation, with Rocky locking himself in his bedroom or the basement (for instance, refusing to attend Max and Debby's wedding) and eventually relenting. His wedding cake comes ten years after the fact—too late not only for the event, but too late for Debby to enjoy at all, for by then her mind, and body, have been touched by multiple sclerosis. The final third of Apple's account relates the devastating effects of her illness on daughter Jessica and son Sam. Jessica buries herself in baseball statistics, and both shun their friends. (``I hate it when people ask me about Mom,'' Jessica says. ``I just tell them she fell off the Empire State Building.'') Apple himself tries to juggle devotion to his hospitalized wife with the complex needs of the children. In the end, it is Apple's affecting writing about his deepest loss that carries this book. Disney will be releasing it as a movie (starring Peter Falk as Rocky).
Pub Date: June 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51826-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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
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