Funny Roy Blount Jr. (Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard, 1991; First Hubby, 1990; etc.), now 55 and a bachelor grandfather, reckons it’s time to take stock of his life. The inventory he produces, no surprise, is nicely written. More than that, it’s The Inside Skinny on Roy and his coming to terms with what he perceives as a curse. It has to do with his family, inevitably, and his ambivalent, close connection to his mother in particular, who regularly adjured her son to “be sweet.” Roy Senior was a solid citizen, a rock of Decatur, Ga. Mama was a lady burdened with a sad childhood. Young Roy’s birth, she made him know, nearly killed her and laid on him the biggest maternal guilt trip in the gentile world. Actually, though his parents may not have been extraordinary in life, Blount makes them so in memory, with writerly filial recollection. His memory, reliable or not, is powerful. “I remember discovering my feet,” he says and follows the assertion with some nice pages. In his search for a defining moment and what it was that turned him comical, Blount unloads a lot about many things, including a little etymology, a visit to China, baseball and sports writing, his marriages, children, and friends, and, bravely, women in general. There’s a nice essay on being funny and an exegesis on the state of juniorhood. True, he may maunder some and wax a tad prolix, but it’s surely a flow of entertaining words. The Latin motto on his stationery, he warns us, is “Si legetis, scribam. If you’ll read it, I’ll write it.” Perhaps not since Sophocles was working has there been such angst about Mama, but Blount’s autobiography is fashioned by a talented writer at the top of his game; and it is real sweet, too.
Pub Date: June 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-40054-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
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