A wild, unseemly, entertaining elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street language that doesn't...
Proletarian novelist Magnuson (The Fire Gospels, 1998, etc.) provides a memoir of his younger days around Menomonee Falls and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
A child of the ’60s, Magnuson (Creative Writing/Southern Illinois Univ.) writes his autobiographical sketches in the third person and in the vernacular with scant attention to grammatical niceties. The result is graphic, edgy, and (to use a favored locution) pretty much kickass. In his musically precocious youth, the author for a while pursued a grungy life in the music room of an abandoned elementary school. There, he kept a set of drums, drank copious amounts of beer, and contemplated the allure of nubile high-school cheerleaders. Occasionally, although he ran to pudge, young Mike even hooked up with a lubricious teenager. The next section shows our near-troglodyte tubby hero as a counselor in a juvenile group home, working with seriously troubled boys. Thence to life with some fierce feminists, lewd women, and several seriously troubled grownups. Clearly, this is not your TV-sitcom, family-style lummox. Yeah, he’s still big (“about 250 in the winter and 230 in the summer”), but within this boorish, bearish, boozing lout, this sweaty, tavern-haunting factory hand, is a perceptive, serious, and intelligent lummox caught in the guise of an oaf. Deep down, Magnuson admits, he's a pussycat. He has a true appreciation of Bach, Wagner, and Coltrane, Proust, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. As one of his juvenile charges told him, “you know all kinda shit you never get to tell anybody about.” Now the big guy gets to tell a bit of it, and it makes for kick-back, totally cool reading.
A wild, unseemly, entertaining elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street language that doesn't hide the talent.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019372-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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