In any case, there’s not much Broadway razzle-dazzle in these extremely decorous pages, but MacNeil’s seen enough to keep...
A quarter-century after Wordstruck (1989), MacNeil returns to the memoir form to limn the slow accrual of character definitions, highlighted by critical historical episodes, which marked him as a newsman and shaped his journey from Canadian birth to US citizenship.
In an always amiable voice, proper though candid, the author acknowledges his adopted country’s faults: crude and excessive, its citizens sometimes seem too much the masters of the universe, a preening bunch who scant the poor as they coddle the rich. Yet MacNeil affirms America’s better nature as a great engine of democracy and prosperity, the cockpit of social evolution, the largest home of tolerance, “a force for good in the world.” Growing up in Nova Scotia, influenced by his Anglophile mother, he wound up living on and off in England for much of his life. A burgeoning news career found him cast to-and-fro across the Atlantic, and he took to the “ethnic minestrone of America . . . a spicy, garlicky, herbal potpourri absent or discouraged in Canada’s white porcelain airs.” Yet it was his career that determined his line of sight as he witnessed the hot and cold wars, assassinations, racism, and corruption. Working for Reuters in London in 1956, MacNeil acquired “an early perspective on the Cold War . . . a little to one side and accustomed to skepticism of American behavior.” When he started the first American public-TV news program in 1975, he sought to dig deeper than the empty soundbite, taking a more studied pace and stressing “coherence and editorial discipline . . . with beat reporters heavily outnumbering producers.” MacNeil’s evolution as a reporter has a distinct, entertaining path, while his attempt to situate his search for a homeland amid his professional wanderings seems spurious. “Walking home one fine evening past Lincoln Center, I had the sudden realization: I am a New Yorker!” Point taken, but it’s a minor point.
In any case, there’s not much Broadway razzle-dazzle in these extremely decorous pages, but MacNeil’s seen enough to keep his reminiscences percolating.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50781-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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