Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming...
A nonfiction-writing professor muses on the random occurrences that led to his parents’ troubled marriage and its subsequent effects on his own trajectory.
Root (Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves, 2013, etc.) ambles along a winding road that begins with the unlikely romance between his mother, Marie, a vivacious young woman focused on marriage and movie stars, and his father, Bob, a quiet, industrious man. A mere two months after the marriage, Bob entered the Marine Corps to fight in World War II, an event that changed the Root family forever. Despite her devout Catholic heritage, Marie, feeling lonely and abandoned, had an affair that resulted in pregnancy; although this infidelity fractured the fledgling marriage, Bob agreed to raise another man’s daughter as his own. Marie favored the girl over her two sons with Bob, and the author grew up feeling alienated from both his parents, spending most of his time reading alone in his room. Over the next several years, his parents divorced, remarried and then divorced again, their tenuous yet stubborn bond remaining constant. After Marie’s death at age 48, the author, now married and studying for a doctorate in English, learned that his mother had engaged in financial deception in addition to adultery. Root’s plainspoken honesty is striking: “I also knew that, even in that moment when I was still in the throes of my own grief and my own sense of loss, I would not forgive my mother for this betrayal.” Further segments address Root’s own divorce and remarriage and the ways that we alternately repeat and reject our parents’ choices.
Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming to terms with parental imperfections.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-191-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
