An absorbing memoir of a tormented upbringing in the fundamentalist Christian South. The author made headlines as a college student in 1993 when his father, Marine Col. Fred Peck, testified before Congress that, although he loved his gay son, there was ``no place in the military for him.'' In his first book, Peck gives a scrupulously honest account of what led to this episode: the intermeshed processes of his break with conservative Christianity and acceptance of his sexuality. He thrusts us into violence and confusion at the start, telling of his vicious stepfather, his real father's mysterious absence, and the frigid Calvinism of his maternal grandparents, shared in part by his mother. Peck attended fundamentalist schools, and before he was ten he was aware of his attraction to other boys, a trait that everyone he knew considered an abomination. For a brief time he joined a charismatic group that encouraged speaking in tongues, providing him with a means of masked self-expression. He reunited intermittently with the father who existed only as a photographic ideal throughout his early childhood; his attempts to define this relationship were compromised until finally he came out to Dad on the eve of the Congressional hearings about gays in the military. Peck avoids polemical argument against fundamentalist beliefs: He recalls without rancor (but, unfortunately, with somewhat overwrought rhetoric) his adolescent attempts to immerse himself in religion while harboring his secret, and he treats his nemeses fairly—even his terrifying grandmother. He never lectures, either about gay activism or about gays in the military. Instead, he negotiates the story of his emotional coming-of-age with a relentless candor that underscores the excruciatingly repressive effects of bigoted dogma and the bravery needed to surmount them. With vivid expressiveness, Peck charts a particularly hazardous passage of self-discovery. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-595362-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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