An imaginative spiritual autobiography, by novelist and biographer Clark (James Beard, 1993; Mr. White’s Confession, 1998; etc.). As someone who “has been variously, and sometimes simultaneously, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, a Transcendentalist, an agnostic, and an atheist,” Clark has an interesting personal history. Moreover, the book is a true “genealogy” in the sense that Clark traces many of these diverse religious manifestations through five centuries of his own family history of Griggses, Homers, and Clarkes [sic]. As Clark himself has cycled back between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, so too did his ancestors, one of whom served on Henry VIII’s Privy Council during the pivotal English Reformation. In the 17th century, Clark’s now-Protestant family established roots in New England, where another ancestor, a doctor in Salem Village in the 1690s, was the first to be called when two young local girls began having fits, and saw his own servant girl gain notoriety as an accuser. Nineteenth-century ancestors dabbled in Transcendentalism (one was Emerson’s cousin), as Clark himself did “five years too late” while in California in the early 1970s (he missed the heyday of communes but arrived in San Francisco in time for the obligatory religious and sexual exploration). He found that his “grab bag” of eclectic spiritual practices didn—t ultimately satisfy him. Though in the early ’90s he considered himself a latter-day Puritan (“not for nothing did nineties poseurs like me so often dress in black”), a long search has recently led him back to the Catholic Church of his Tudor ancestors, bringing five centuries of history full circle. Creative in its connections of genealogy and personal history.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20932-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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