A brutally honest emotional odyssey.
A memoir about a middle-aged journalist who decided that running in his father's footsteps was his best shot at resurrection.
Several years ago, with his writing career tanking and a failed marriage, Powell (This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez, 2012, etc.) happened to read a magazine article trumpeting the intoxicating running scene in Boulder, Colo. Freshly inspired, he packed up his Miami apartment, grabbed his loyal dog and hit the road intent on reinventing himself. The author recounts his personal story of how he spent a rigorous year of his life sleeping in a converted chicken coop and running among the bracing Flatirons in a bid to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Boston has always loomed large in Powell's self-loathing psyche since his father set the standard decades earlier when he successfully ran the road race as a remarkable middle-aged novice. The emotionally bereft son's complex relationship with his father runs throughout this sinewy narrative. "He never talked about work at the dinner table when I was a kid,” writes the author. “What he did with his time, on those business trips or in that office of his, was his world alone." During the course of his less-than-magical year of kinetic reinvention, Powell also began to consider Frank Shorter, former Olympian and curious Boulder running icon, as something close to an anti-father, the perfect obsessive and self-destructive example of how not to behave. No matter how far he ran, however, Powell couldn’t seem to put much distance between himself and the woman he originally walked out on or the subsequent women who, in turn, walked out on him. Pounding the pavement didn’t yield any easy answers, and the author's redemption is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, by the end of Powell's relentlessly critical self-analysis, it's clear there's still a lot more road left to be run.
A brutally honest emotional odyssey.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26366-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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