Novelist Williams (Blue Crystal, 1993, etc.) presents twined, elemental stories on the havoc of a heart operation and the random, filigreed thoughts of an amateur naturalist exploring his home patch. His family has a history of bum tickers, so it didn’t come as a surprise to Williams when he learned he had Barlow’s Syndrome, a faulty valve. But that was 15 years ago. In the meantime he married, had two children, wrote a few books, bought a house in deeply rural north-central Georgia on a forested ridge above tumbling Wildcat Creek, and steadily approached his dreaded 43rd birthday, an age at which the heart-poor in his family uniformly bowed out. Sure enough, that year he gets news he will need surgery; his valve is shot. He starts to be more attentive, in particular to the land and creatures around his home. His observations are presented as little ruminative comfortings and explorations of the wildflowers, the pink light of stormy weather, the winding sand dunes in the flow of the creek, scrappy blue jays and mesmerizing raptors, earthworms and spiders and honeysuckle. They slowly accrete for him into something more than sense of place and less than the music of the spheres, something deep and mortally inclusive, wherein he endeavors, humbly for the most part, to find a niche. Braided to this curious naturalist is the heart patient, scared and angry, who details the visits to the doctor, the surgery, and the recovery, a process in which he is flayed emotionally and cracked open physically, and vice versa. Depression settles in and moves on only after a prolonged pharmaceutical tithing. Gradually, out of the pain and shadow emerge his family and homestead, and they never looked so good. Williams’s story has a keen immediacy to it, an unmulled flavor. It is all very real and unenviable and touched with the small gestures—his father’s protective shoulder to cry upon, a daughter’s delight in his return—that encourage survival.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2090-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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