A well-told story of the raw ingredients of growing up, free of bluster but full of brio. (Eight-page photo insert, not seen)
A valentine to summer camp from recently deposed Disney CEO Eisner, who makes it clear why the camp reverberates for him to this very day.
Camp Keewaydin sits snuggly by a lake in mid-Vermont. It’s a venerable camp of the old school, keeping one eye on character building and emotional growth—with lots of challenges, from arts to sports to long camping trips—and the other on planned freedom, offering the camper a fistful of opportunities to get busy or lay back. It isn’t a tony establishment, but a rough and ready one, a place where you’ll glean a few experiences that will benefit you later in life (“risk is good, but survival is better”) or, as Eisner says, not without a hint of distaste, that will allow you to endure “Hollywood antics and boardroom politics.” The story he tells is a braided and generous one, of his own growth at the camp from ages 8 to 22, a span that brought many firsts—being away from home, pulling his own weight, learning the importance of tradition, taking on responsibilities he knew would test his abilities. It’s the story also of two boys Eisner later sponsored at the camp, Pepe and Q, from down-if-not-out Los Angeles. The two bring a very different quality to the camp than the regulars do. Their stories are interesting if not compelling—maybe because Eisner didn’t see the events when they happened but had an operative observe them and report back. But Eisner’s own recollections are smart and immediate: remembering the camp’s surroundings, the tents and halls and playing fields, the bite of not winning awards, his clowning as a staffman, finding himself once in charge of a bloodied camper miles from nowhere, or remembering the sachem qualities of the camp’s long-time director.
A well-told story of the raw ingredients of growing up, free of bluster but full of brio. (Eight-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53369-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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