A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.
A writer and editor considers how the places he’s called home have ultimately defined him as an African-American man.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s American Lives series, McCrary writes of becoming aware of his black heritage early in life but also about the impression his skin color had on others in small-town Normal, Illinois, in the 1980s and '90s. Spending his childhood on the campus of Illinois State University, “a place engineered for surface-level equality,” where his parents met and began a family, the author was greatly influenced by the wisdom of James Baldwin. McCrary traverses some rich territory in his lifetime so far, delivering insightful essays on racial and identity issues, class assumptions, family pride, and his own sexuality. He admits to a youthful reluctance to embrace his black heritage and that this type of self-segregation still endures: “Outside of my family I’ve managed to remain close to no other black people,” he concedes, adding that it is not “a real excuse; more a reason spurred by my discomfort with the subtleties of race in my hometown.” This kind of refreshing honesty and frank self-examination permeates the pages of the memoir, in which McCrary also contemplates the inherent queerness that emerged during childhood but didn’t solidify due to “fear and convenience” until his college years. He was waiting, he writes, for “something more dramatic than schoolboy crushes to shake me into myself.” Spending his 20s in Chicago matured and freed him from the restraints of suburban life but not enough to allow him to come to true terms with his sexuality. Through self-admitted “muddy but invaluable” experiences, McCrary’s authentic identity and self-confidence eventually emerged after years of self-loathing behaviors. He reflects fondly on his time studying abroad in Prague, a city he courts an active obsession with, a “geographic flirtation” fortified by Czech history, heritage, food and drink, and cabaret adventures.
A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0786-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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 2026 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.
