by Richard Kilroy O'Malley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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