A relentlessly gritty but good-humored tale of hope and survival.
Memoir of a childhood waylaid by a miscreant alcoholic father, notable for the enduring affection that comes to the surface.
Money is so tight for the author’s divorced mother in Albany, New York, that she sends 11-year-old Michael off to live with his estranged father, a sometime bellhop and jack of all menial hotel trades. She can barely support Michael’s two younger sisters on a waitress’s pay, and besides, received wisdom holds in the spring of 1959, “Boys should be with their father, and girls should be with their mother.” Michael suspects he is unloved by either parent, but Dad’s scheme to ditch Albany and find a better life for the two of them in California quickly awakens what will grow into a fierce wanderlust. Keith (Communications/Boston Coll.) chronicles their peregrinations with graphic recall and a gift for detail. After the bus money runs out, they face the hitchhiker’s ultimate reality: you take what you get. Often penniless, sometimes on a shoestring that permits, for instance, a “Christmas dinner” consisting of calves liver and canned yams, they stumble westward, city by faceless city. In each venue, the elder Keith makes a show of providing for his son, picking up odd jobs (often via a newly acquired “friend” from a bar binge) but usually screwing up to the point where they go on the grift, convincing some kindly soul that a “letter with money from out of town” is due any day if they can just get a room and a few groceries. Left on his own while Dad is either working or sleeping one off, Michael gets buffeted by life at its seamiest—he’s once even charged as an accomplice to an armed robbery—while absorbing street smarts and coming dangerously close to loving the life he hates.
A relentlessly gritty but good-humored tale of hope and survival.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-364-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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.
