Entertaining letters that reflect genuine concern and love despite the rarely taken advice.
Epistolary commentary from a father to his son.
Starting in 1967 and covering a span of more than 20 years, Mortimer reproduces the correspondence his father, Roger, sent to him throughout his life. These letters, along with brief explanations of the circumstances or context of each letter by the son, provide "humorous insight into the life of a mildly dysfunctional English middle-class family in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980.” There's the mother, aka Nidnod, who loves to fox hunt, drink and entertain; the author's older sister, Jane, aka Miss Cod-Cutlet; the younger sister, Louise, aka Lumpy Lou; and a host of other characters who ramble in and out of Mortimer's letters. The father frequently reflects on his son's inability to hold a steady job and ponders when he will ever amount to anything; the son even admits his “endless shortcomings, failures, disasters and general inability to live up to the high hopes and aspirations” his parents had for him. Dogs and horses abound, in the field and underfoot, as well as commentary on the latest horrible accident to occur in the neighborhood. Typical letters include reflections on the weather, and other themes include the lack of money, the exorbitant amount on the phone bill and the high cost of eating out. Droll humor abounds, as when the father describes one woman's work on the index of his forthcoming book: "[N]o sober individual could have done such a lamentable job. I have just sent in a note of protest that will ruffle a few feathers (I hope).” The author makes many references to British people in high society, which American readers may find difficult to follow. A brief glossary of British terms for an American edition would have been useful.
Entertaining letters that reflect genuine concern and love despite the rarely taken advice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03851-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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