Wins points for breaking the cultural mold, but a little too plain and unadorned.
A British journalist comes to terms with his immigrant upbringing and love of Bruce Springsteen, each crippling in its own way.
Manzoor grew up in working-class Luton and, as related in his sketchy memoir, fit neither the molds set out by the society around him nor those of his Muslim parents. Early on, it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a drone like his father, a tough-as-nails factory worker with a jones for self-improvement, or marry a good Pakistani girl like his long-suffering, guilt-dispensing mother. In a series of eight slightly overlapping essays, Manzoor tells the story of growing up as a young Pakistani boy destined for backbreaking labor and adult responsibilities, only to have his life forever changed by hearing Springsteen’s music in college. Later on, he became a journalist for the BBC and the Guardian, but what really mattered was The Boss. Each chapter opens with a quote from the appropriate Springsteen lyric, and there’s no passage in Manzoor’s life so pressing or important that he can’t find a way to relate The Boss to it. Springsteen even appears when Manzoor discusses his troubled relationship with religion: “I wanted to be a Muslim like Philip Roth was a Jew or Bruce Springsteen was a Catholic.” Although Manzoor maintains a healthy sense of self-mocking humility and does an excellent job portraying his fantastically complicated striver of a father, his listless prose eventually makes this short book less rewarding than it should be.
Wins points for breaking the cultural mold, but a little too plain and unadorned.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38802-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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