Easiest to digest in snack-size portions.
Memories of a Michigan upbringing proceed to anecdotes on retirement in Italy, as a writing professor writes what pleases him, which is often about what doesn’t.
In this collection of short essays, Bailey (Emeritus, English/Henry Ford Coll.; co-editor: The Creative Writer's Craft: Lessons in Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, 1999, etc.) skips back and forth across time and place. Many of these pieces have been published in literary journals and small magazines, and they weren’t necessarily intended (or sequenced) to be read as a whole. However, there are certain themes that pervade throughout. Some touch on mankind as part of nature and apart from it: “The outhouse was where man met beast, and the beast was himself.” Some decry the ways that regional differences (especially in food) have given way to cultural homogenization. “Much of the United States looks like Ohio warmed over,” he writes in the concluding title essay. “Pull off the freeway...and you’ll see the same thing. When you pass the Bed Bath and Beyond, you’ll know that Chili’s is not far away.” Bailey writes of flip-flops and sweatpants, of the idiosyncratic differences that a long, loving marriage encompasses, and of living in the very different cultures of the Midwest and of Italy, land of his wife’s familial ancestors, where both of them feel comfortable. He writes of dreams, nightmares, and memories while recognizing of the last that “memory is capricious, frequently a liar.” If readers identify with what he writes, that’s fine, but one never gets the sense that he’s writing for anyone but himself and that his essays represent the written equivalent of thinking out loud—or musing, wryly and wistfully. Maybe he writes because that’s what academics do, write to publish, and because that’s what writers do, observe to write.
Easiest to digest in snack-size portions.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0119-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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