Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.
Poet Messer spins the life story of her childhood home in a handsome voice often eerily lost in reflection.
Nonetheless, this is a document of history, and this is a house with a long one, starting in 1647 when Walter Hatch made a small purchase of land in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and built a structure with wattle-and-daub chimney, thatched roof, and oiled-paper windows. Members of the Hatch family lived there for nearly 300 years, enduring many winters during which they “stood scorched-faced before the fire, while the rest of the room to their backs filled with frost.” In 1965, the author’s father bought the Red House, and she grew up there. Messer (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) elaborates the calendar of her days in and with the house, layered like a parfait between chronicles of the earlier inhabitants, who had left a rich paper legacy. Messer’s recollections sometimes feel as hoary as those of the Hatches: she speaks of her father tying tinfoil bows on the fruit trees to scare away hungry birds, so that “the whole yard shook with the soft tinkling of the bows and spots of light”; and when she spied on her sister playing the piano, “I would lie down and peer through the cracks in the floorboards where I could see her hands moving over the keys, feeling only the thin space, the board, between me and the room below.” Even the aftermath of a terrifying fire that decimated the building in 1971 is described with a poet’s lyricism: “Entering a burned house was like entering a dream mind—some elements were missing entirely or moved to other locations, the rooms the same but clouded, slightly off.” In a good way, much like Messer’s prose.
Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.Pub Date: June 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03315-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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