Moving statement of faith from reformed criminal.
Heartbreaking inspirational memoir of one young man’s battle to overcome poverty and crime.
Born out of wedlock in 1949, Isley spent his youth steeped in poverty, picking cotton alongside his grandparents, who raised him and 13 other children. Growing up parentless as an African-American boy in rural North Carolina, Isley faced hardship at every turn. He was drawn into crime at an early age, falling in with a bad crowd and their lifestyle of petty thievery. Soon enough, however, Isley became a major gambler and the severity of his crimes worsened: in the tenth grade, he stabbed a boy and was nearly sent to prison. By the time he turned 20, Isley was an accomplished loan shark living in Philadelphia, managing an illegal gambling ring and dabbling in drugs. At 23, he was the center of an up-and-coming crime syndicate. It was a lifestyle that could not last. After former friendships soured and a hit man was hired to kill him, Isley left his life of crime and started fresh with his young wife Carmen. They moved into a new neighborhood, opened a small corner store and managed to keep afloat in the face of rigorous obstacles. The couple’s new home was serendipitously located next door to a Catholic church, and Isley turned to his neighboring congregation for spiritual guidance. The values formerly instilled by his deeply religious grandparents were renewed and the family soon became deeply involved with the church. Several years later, Isley was ordained as a Roman Catholic deacon. The author’s style is rough-hewn, but this only accentuates the scrapes and stumbles of his life. Isley mainly lets his tale tell its own moral, forgoing any sermonizing, but he makes clear throughout the text that good parents, strong friendships and true love can make all the difference.
Moving statement of faith from reformed criminal.Pub Date: July 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425764692
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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