In a powerful yet theoretically overwrought memoir, Awkward (English/Univ. of Penn.) depicts the variegated influences that led him to become, in his terms, a —black male feminist.— Awkward grew up in Southwark, a rundown Philadelphia public housing project, in the early 1970s. He excelled in school but outside ran a cruel gauntlet—his alcoholic mother, the casual viciousness of ghetto-kid culture, the potentially lethal gangs—that left him bewildered over the notions of maleness projected by an environment in which sexuality was degraded and women were brutalized. Escaping on scholarship to private school, he was still confounded in this less dangerous environment by the strictures of the black students— clique, which was intensely leery of the —whiteboy— majority, and he faced similar experiences at Brandeis and throughout his teaching career at Michigan and Penn. Many moments in Awkward’s narrative—his musings on the death of his abusive father and on his mother’s descent into and recovery from alcoholism, for example—are imaginatively unsettling or intellectually provocative. But the author constantly interrupts his story to refashion it into a parable of African-American intellectual difference. Although some will enjoy Awkward’s flights into literary theory, he seems distracted by his own ideas and unable to resist dilating on every possible theory of blackness and gender. His recollections of his stricken childhood are thought-provoking and often scorching, but the important realities he recalls are diffused by his rhetorical fussing over the vagaries of identity politics. At once, then, a sobering memoir of one particular African-American child’s triumph over brutality and long odds, and an extended consideration of cultural issues that are not only more general but far more familiar.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8223-2402-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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