Rambling but sometimes inspiring.
Former National Public Radio producer Ellis recalls the year she spent interviewing American centenarians for Morning Edition.
The author is willing to let her own anxieties seep frequently into the mix as she approaches stranger after stranger, all 100 or older. At first daunted by the occasional dementia and unresponsiveness, she wonders if the project is really a good idea. Then Ellis encounters some amazing centenarians, among them a woman who gets up early in the morning to row a boat on the lake by her house, occasionally indulging in skinny-dipping “when there’s no fishermen around”; a 101-year-old professor in his 71st year of teaching who tutors law students at New York’s Baruch College, using humor and a dry wit to impress the finer points of jurisprudence on slackers and hopeless cases; and an Oklahoma rancher looking for yet another wife. Ellis finds herself being drawn farther and farther into each of these twilight worlds, sensing rather than extracting into words the feelings of her subjects. When one man declares that the world is about to end, the hair on Ellis’s neck rises disconcertingly; it leads to a session with a (non-centenarian) psychotherapist about so-called limbic resonance phenomena, in which mammals’ brains apprehend others’ emotional states without benefit of the senses. In ensuing centenarian encounters, Ellis relaxes, worries less about controlling the pace or content, and just listens. Common threads emerge: it’s clear people who live this long basically want to; they would rather recall the good times than rail against the bad; most found love of one kind or other that became a central theme in their lives; and, finally, most are wistful about the vanishing of the work ethic and of unchallenged moral authority.
Rambling but sometimes inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60842-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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