There were plenty of hand-scrawled signs in public places saying, "Kilroy was here." He probably was, and he certainly made...
Reminiscing about a teenage hobo adventure, former newsman O'Malley describes what happens when a young man from Montana rides the rails and looks for work during the Great Depression.
The narrative is modeled on the old Saturday Evening Post, loaded with action-packed dramatic scenes and propulsive energy. After the violent opening—in which our hero, Richard Maloney (called "Slim") is beaten up by a railroad "yard bull" in charge of keeping freeloaders off the trains, and subsequently finds company and consolation by the fireside of friendly hobos—O'Malley embarks full-steam-ahead on a narrative journey that makes real the plight of thousands of unemployed and desperate people. Not all those whom Slim meets are saints—some beat him up and rob him blind; others, such as an out-of-work railroad porter, urge him to commit crime. He resists, finding instead backbreaking work digging potatoes (25 cents a day, plus all the potatoes he can eat, plus shelter in a barn). Trips to Los Angeles, the Mojave desert and beyond begin to blur in the reader's mind as he describes a closely focused life in strict survival mode. He thinks only about where he can get another meal, whether the railroad "bull" will catch him, or whether the next guy will be a crazed murderer (he meets several while riding the rails). O'Malley packs the story with lively anecdotes, such as playing the only piano tune he knows for poor moonshine-makers desperate for dance, or working as a fake "townie" who dares to challenge the carnival champ—a brain-damaged fellow known as "Battler"—for $2 a fight. After landing unjustly in jail for vagrancy, he witnesses a suicide and an execution during his 90 days behind bars. He also begins to recognize his own imperfections—though he hadn't realized it before, he was "white proud and that was no damn good." After a year and a half on the road he returns home a somewhat broken—but much wiser—man, and still only 19 years old. The voice drifting from the '30s is authentic, but lacking in a suspenseful dramatic thread to keep the pages turning. Nonetheless, he illuminates those trying times with heartfelt emotion and genuine humanity.
There were plenty of hand-scrawled signs in public places saying, "Kilroy was here." He probably was, and he certainly made his mark.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-4033-5448-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2011
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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