Well written and researched, showcasing the author’s pride in his Irish Catholic heritage.
Uneven collection of essays, articles, reviews and speeches on the history and identity of the Irish in America.
Speechwriter turned historical novelist Quinn (Hour of the Cat, 2005, etc.) offers much here to delight, annoy and perhaps even offend. Almost every piece demonstrates his substantial knowledge of history and his wide reading. He’s particularly well informed about the potato famine, whose spectral presence haunts the text. (In two places, the author notes some similarities to the Holocaust.) Many died in Ireland; many more immigrated to the United States, where, as the author observes, they were not greeted with joy. In one of his strongest essays, “Closets Full of Bones,” Quinn notes the similarity of the brutal hostility and discrimination the Irish faced to today’s hysterical reactions to new waves of immigrants. The reason our politicians, public and media pundits are so exercised is simple, he writes: “They don’t know history.” Another fine piece, “The Bronx Is Burning,” blends the author’s personal experiences as a court officer in the Bronx’s Landlord and Tenant Court with some insightful comments about immigration, poverty and hopelessness. Graceful writing and a seamless blending of historical and personal material distinguish the book throughout, though some of the early entries land in unsurprising, even sentimental places. “Faith and Imagination,” a section containing five meditations on the Irish and the Roman Catholic church, may annoy Protestants and non-Christians: Quinn is a proud Catholic and expresses not the slightest doubt about the divinity of Jesus or the existence of hell.
Well written and researched, showcasing the author’s pride in his Irish Catholic heritage.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-58567-870-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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