Gilberg delivers a debut memoir about coming-of-age in 1950s Ohio.
The author serves as a guide to the seemingly quintessential Midwestern town of New Bremen. He shows readers a time and place in which everyone seemed to know their neighbors, from the doctors who made house calls to the farmers who needed extra help in hay season. Hardwood trees stood in abundance, so that “riding a bicycle down most of the town’s streets was like going through quiet, leafy, shady, green tunnels.” Of course, it was also a time of Cold War paranoia and fear of a polio epidemic. Gilberg also offers up a firsthand account of a time of change for young people, with rock ’n’ roll making its assault on school dances and car enthusiasts pursuing their passion for customization. It’s this latter aspect that gives the book its title and takes up a great deal of its narrative focus. Specifically, the author tells of how he helped to found an automotive club called the Road Rebels (“New Bremen was going to have a car club! Just because”) and shares their many adventures as well as his undying enthusiasm for engines. The book is most intriguing when it includes the sorts of details and anecdotes that less personal histories often overlook, such as the fact that the official Road Rebel shirt had “Safety Club” embroidered on the left sleeve or how the author earnestly participated in the retrospectively silly Civilian Air Patrol Ground Observer Corps. The book isn’t all Leave It to Beaver moments, though; death comes to New Bremen in horrific ways, and the author realizes that he eventually must move on to bigger and better things. Some of Gilberg’s reflections, such as an account of him and his friends playing with carbide cannons, don’t offer as much excitement as others do. They do, however, help to create a more complete picture of what it was like to be alive in those bygone days. A highly personal and readable remembrance that paints an appealing picture of the past.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5724-6
Page Count: 266
Publisher: True Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
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