Roth has used the relationship between his life and art in a gimmicky way in his fiction, and even his brutal memoir The Facts (1988) was not free of this defect. Now, however, he discards all the artifices in this searing account of his 86-year-old father's physical decline and death. "You must not forget anything," Roth admonishes himself at the end of this father-and-son tale, and indeed, from the detail accumulated here, one doubts that his eye, unerring ear, and memory have missed a thing. Misdiagnosed at first as having a viral infection that caused temporary paralysis to one side of the face, father Herman Roth soon learned the bleaker truth: he had a brain tumor. As this once-vigorous retired Newark insurance manager refused to go gentle into that good night, Philip watched with mingled awe and fear. The only respites from this harrowing procession of bodily disasters—including diminished eyesight and incontinence—are flashbacks that provide fascinating glimpses into American Jewish life in the first half of this century—as well as into Roth père, a blunt perfectionist who sometimes drove his late wife, children, and loved ones to distraction (after being advised of the need for an operation, Herman lashes out at his long-suffering companion for not opening a can of soup correctly). Even before Philip has his own terrifying brush with death in an emergency quintuple bypass operation, he realizes that his father taught and embodied "the vernacular, unpoetic and unexpressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular's glaring limitations and all its durable force." An elegy of overwhelming horror and pity—filled with Roth's graceful prose and narrative control, but also with a humanity sometimes missing in his other work.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1990
ISBN: 0679752935
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
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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