A richly detailed and always engaging memoir on artistic discovery.
The lively debut memoir by a Tin House magazine co-founding editor about growing up in West Berlin then returning as an adult to post–Soviet-era East Berlin to find artistic purpose.
In 1964, Spillman’s parents went to Berlin on Fulbright scholarships to study music. When they separated a few years later, they decided that their small son would live with his closeted gay father. Surrounded by reminders of the Cold War—such as the Berlin Wall and a “giant U.S. Army base”—Spillman became immersed in a colorfully creative world of artists who hailed from all over the world. He and his father left only after the latter accepted a teaching position at the Eastman School of Music in New York. A perpetual outsider who felt at home nowhere, Spillman “read…to escape…but also to find myself,” especially after he went to live with his mother in Baltimore. During this period, the author also took up running and experimented with drugs. On the way to figuring out that he wanted to write, Spillman failed out of college once before finishing and survived three major car crashes. In New York City, he met his future wife, Elissa, and embarked on Kerouac-esque travel adventures in the U.S., Portugal, and then the former East Berlin, which had become a “petri dish of creation and foment, a rubble field in which to create a new life with the woman I loved.” Yet for all its familiarity, flaws, and youthful energy, the city never completely felt like home to Spillman, who decided to stop running away from himself and his life only after a brush with near tragedy. Musically and culturally astute, this well-structured book is a delightful coming-of-age story couched within a travel narrative that deftly evokes one of the major historical moments of the 20th century.
A richly detailed and always engaging memoir on artistic discovery.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2483-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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