And would she ever make them proud in these pages. Emotionally luxurious and heart-gladdening. (22 photos)
Novelist/essayist Volk (White Light, not reviewed) pens a stylishly written memoir that’s really a series of portraits of the memorable characters who make up her extended family.
It’s a simple approach, if you can pull it off: one beguiling vignette after another, and a good number of welcome reprises. Volk’s classy prose, as smooth on its wheels as a Bentley, makes it work like a wonder. Hers is a Jewish, New York City restaurant family whose members conducted a high-octane love affair with one another—well, all except for Aunt Lil, who “went through life thinking she got the small half.” There are the distant relatives who glitter like stars in the family firmament: the paternal great-grandfather who brought pastrami to New York City in 1888, the aunt who sported the “Best Legs in Atlantic City” in 1916. There’s the woman who worked for them: “It was a bizarre New York Jewish sensibility that we could somehow protect Millie from prejudice by never acknowledging there was such a thing as color.” But mostly there is the benign despot of a father, a godhead, a man who inspires such love in Volk that it aches; the glamorous mother who cooked only one dinner Volk can remember (it tasted like licorice roast); and the sister with whom she fought sibling trench warfare, who has incontrovertible proof that her bones are big (she had them measured by electrodes) and who packs the kind of worldly wisdom that sets reality squarely in sight: “I know every diet. Here’s the trick, okay? Here’s all you have to know: Eat less.” Volk’s conclusion? “They were mine, I was lucky to have them.”
And would she ever make them proud in these pages. Emotionally luxurious and heart-gladdening. (22 photos)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41106-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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