Blistering scrapbook pages from a melancholy childhood.
Simple yet affecting follow-up to MacDonald’s raw debut memoir, All Souls (1999).
The previous book detailed in broad brushstrokes a difficult life growing up in the Old Colony housing project of prideful, Irish-Catholic South Boston. The author, now nearing 40, digs deeper this time, providing a more introspective, personal tour (spliced with pages of song lyrics) of his loss of innocence as one of nine children living in a drug-and organized-crime-ridden environment, barely supervised by his wise, accordion-playing Ma. His neighborhood provided a generally pleasant though restrictive enclave of family and friends, but MacDonald craved “venturing alone beyond Southie’s borders.” The early-’80s punk-rock scene afforded him all that and more. Though initially pensive, teenager MacDonald, inspired by Patti Smith, was soon shoplifting his first Sex Pistols album, attending school with spiky pink hair and a dog collar and covering his bedroom windows with black cloth. This behavior led to late nights sneaking into bars with new friends, finding himself onstage at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert, then skipping school altogether. New York City and dance clubs like Danceteria and the Mudd Club provided a much-needed respite from the increasingly treacherous streets of Southie, but nothing could prepare MacDonald for the systematic deterioration of his siblings: Schizophrenic Davey killed himself, Kathy almost succumbed to a drug overdose, Frankie and Kevin met violent ends. Eventually, situational stresses began to weigh heavily on MacDonald’s psyche, and he turned to alcohol and drugs “to erase, to forget about everything”—except the funeral for the father he barely knew. After therapy, he moved onward to several carefree, if penniless, weeks in Europe, but an enlightening visit to Ireland with his mother was what really turned him around. Though the author, now a social activist, emerged physically unscathed from his upbringing, the emotional scars he bears are undeniable.
Blistering scrapbook pages from a melancholy childhood.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-47025-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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