Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder...
Young (Waging Heavy Peace, 2012) returns to reflect on the two defining love affairs of his life: cars and dogs.
The author’s interest in cars dates back to when he was a young boy riding around in his family’s 1948 Monarch Business Coupe with his dog Skippy tucked away in the car’s trunk. Perhaps the reason cars made such an impression on him is that the family moved around so often, developing a sense of itinerancy that fostered a love of being on the road. Young’s many road trips, however, allow him to retroactively calculate the emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This recurring diversion awkwardly interrupts the narrative, but Young feels obliged to include it due to his eco-conscious beliefs. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: the author’s love of cars against his awareness of the ecological damage caused by fossil fuel consumption. Nevertheless, Young reveals that his interest in cars was always about their aesthetic appeal, and it was not merely limited to the newest and most streamlined vehicles. The author admits that what really caught his eye were cars with an indescribable uniqueness, which often attracted him to “clunkers.” These cars spoke to Young, holding a romantic sway over him. Among his favorites was the black hearse that functioned as the Squires’ unofficial tour bus, as well as a 1957 Corvette he purchased to reward himself after his first taste of success with Buffalo Springfield. The plaintive and straightforward approach to Young’s remembrances evokes a kindly paternalism as he candidly recounts details of his experiences forging his musical ambition in Canadian clubs, the hippie scene in Los Angeles, his later solo career and the innumerable rides that took him there. Ultimately, Young issues a warning about our dependence on fossil fuels and the resultant threat of climate change while showcasing new and efficient alternative fuel systems.
Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder that the Earth is more important than a hobby.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399172083
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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