Hoffman writes of his father that “he was more comfortable with his many contradictions than I am with mine,” in a book in...
A professor’s literary-minded meditations on fatherhood.
As a writer of poems, stories and a previous memoir (Half the House, 1996), and as someone who has “been teaching writers for nearly twenty years, focused especially on the memoir and the personal essay,” Emerson College senior writer in residence Hoffman knows how to recognize good material and how to frame and organize it, even as he dilutes the immediacy of emotion here with more abstract musings on pornography, feminism, and issues of race and class. In other words, his memoir is more powerful when it is showing us (his direct experience) rather than telling us (his ideas). This begins with the author and his brother talking with their father about his impending death, and it ends with the father’s funeral. “Sometimes I think I’ve had two fathers: the one who made me, and the one I’ve made of him,” he muses. This book is about both, as well as how the author’s own fatherhood has affected his feelings toward his father: “Being a new father, I was having a hard time with my dad—with him, with my memory of him, and with my idea of him.” The father and his family were blue-collar, not particularly reflective, and matter-of-fact in their racism. The author was sexually molested as a boy by his coach (whom his previous memoir helped send to prison), became an alcoholic, realized in recovery that his son had the same problem, and had to come to terms with his unwed daughter’s pregnancy, by a Jamaican man with a criminal history and an increasingly tangled relationship with both the author and his daughter. “I had feelings too complicated to fully understand,” writes the author of his impending grandfatherhood and the less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding it.
Hoffman writes of his father that “he was more comfortable with his many contradictions than I am with mine,” in a book in which readers are also likely to find more contradictions than comfort.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4471-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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