If Detroit is grim and fraught, it is in its tensions that Clemens finds the material to make his memoir thrum like his...
A deep-running portrait of growing up in Detroit during the 1970s and 80s.
Born in 1973, Clemens was already an anachronism in his youth: white, from a working class family and living in a city that wasn’t— where Manifest Destiny ran in reverse, where even Motown left Motown. Why his family continued to abide south of Eight Mile Road is not clearly understood by Clemens, just as many things regarding the place are not understood, but to Clemens’ everlasting credit, he wants to learn. He delves into literature, for one, from James Baldwin to Ralph Ellison, James Joyce to William Faulkner. They profoundly influence his sense of self, yet they won’t nearly have the impact of his father: a plain-speaking man given to worshipping at the altar of the internal combustion engine, one who impresses on his son the value of integrity, to get things right, meet your responsibilities daily, apply common sense (including starting up the dragster at 3 a.m.—all part of his charm). His mother, too, will be there to polish a lens through which Clemens can see himself clearly, for he is a man now warring with himself: “a racist, perhaps, but probably not one full of shit.” Not at all full of shit, and not a racist either; Clemens doesn’t traffick in received opinions. If he perceives Detroit as hopeless, at least Clemens doesn’t tut-tut from afar; crime, corruption, the pure lack of common sense—the city has scoured him at first hand. He is not impressed enough with humanity in general to elevate any race, nor will he be abased by one. At one point, as Clemens pursues an advanced degree in literature, he finds himself increasingly drawn to expression over content, after years of striving to learn and understand. At least he doesn’t make that mistake here.
If Detroit is grim and fraught, it is in its tensions that Clemens finds the material to make his memoir thrum like his father’s dragster.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51140-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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