An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
Calling himself “a misfit Englishman…with a taste for remote places,” the author of God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (2008) buys a former plantation house, deep in the Mississippi Delta, and thus commences an education—his and ours.
When journalist and TV host Grant decided to move to Holes County, “the poorest county in America’s poorest state,” neither he nor his girlfriend, Mariah, had ever been to the region. Nonetheless, they bought their place near the Yazoo River in an area called Pluto and immediately begin receiving tutelage from nature and neighbors. The author provides accounts of battles with cottonmouths, armadillos, and biting insects, of deer hunting (Mariah, once a vegetarian, changed her tastes), of struggles with heat and humidity and remoteness. They were stunned to discover the generosity of neighbors, both black and white. The Delta, which is more than 80 percent black, still manifests—as Grant repeatedly shows—many lingering troubles from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond. Among the most useful early advice he received: compartmentalize. Overlook the noxious opinions of your neighbors; enjoy the good parts. So he and Mariah did precisely that. Throughout the course of the year’s residence that Grant records, he takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church, Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Prison), a school that’s doing pretty well (most are not), and a local political campaign. We sit in on visits with local musicians and local raconteurs, whose tales, at times, tend to go on a bit, testing readers’ patience. But the issue that repeatedly emerges—and how can it not?—is race. Continually, we hear the views of locals, the author, and Mariah, and we discover that corrosive racism is still alive and well.
An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0964-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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