An outrageous, scandalously good-humored tribute from a loving son.
The “other woman” surfaces at last and with a vengeance in this tour-de-force sequel to the author's applauded family memoir, 44: Dublin Made Me (1999).
Former director of Dublin’s renowned Abbey Theater, Sheridan can add his name to that list of Irish writers in whose hands the English language plays like a harp: endlessly yet effortlessly lyrical. The soaring tenets of the Catholic faith versus the reality of what flesh is heir to would be grist enough for this kind of talent, but in Sheridan's case, a triangular romance engendered by a paterfamilias with pretensions of practical bigamy enters the mix and endures as the boy becomes a man. Following his father's death, Sheridan revisits his own coming of age in the context of unraveling and coming to terms with the bizarre relationship of his parents and the indefatigable Doris, a wraith of an Englishwoman with a supernatural sense of commitment. Of his iron-willed mother, Sheridan writes: “Ma knew instinctively that to criticize Da was to make herself vulnerable. Instead, she welcomed Doris into the bosom of her family, from where she could keep a close eye on her.” Much of the narrative concerns discovery of the true Da, viewed through the author's eyes and those of the two women he adored, betrayed, and inspired. The enduring tone, a juxtaposition of tenderness and hilarity, is crystallized at Da's wake, where the author finds himself “celebrating with laughter in a place designed for tears. I had never felt such sadness and joy side by side, never thought that loss could be so funny, never realized that laughter could be so spiritual.” Sheridan's ear for priceless Anglo-Irish dialogue provides the engine that pulls each scenario onstage and off, and his dramatic pacing is so expert that more critical readers may wonder how closely he’s hewed to his story’s factual basis. Everyone else will be too busy turning the pages.
An outrageous, scandalously good-humored tribute from a loving son.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03100-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
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