Remarkable neither in prose nor plotting, this memoir is still compelling and inspiring.
An autobiography that very much resembles a 20th-century, African-American Horatio Alger novel.
Byrd’s life story traces a remarkable arc. Born fatherless, black and poor in Mississippi in the late 1930s, he appeared to have the entire deck stacked against him. However, the successful and prosperous life he subsequently carves out proves that a strong sense of community, a supportive family, a positive attitude and a little luck can launch one beyond the bounds of even the most suffocating of socio-economical or historical circumstances. In many ways a classic picaresque novel, The author’s story is episodic, following the adventures of a loveable rogue–getting his sister in trouble as a kid, actively working as a ghetto pool hustler as a teenager and even loan-sharking during his time in the Navy–as he moves from place to place, adventure to adventure, sliding easily among various social milieu and surviving primarily on his wits. Despite the neatly packaged life lessons offered in the final chapter, a surprising measure of amorality and chaos dominates much of Byrd’s life–through luck alone, he often narrowly escapes serious trouble that would have severely altered the eventual course of his life. Luck aside, the author’s innate ability to make friends everywhere he goes, his belief that everyone should walk away from the table with something and his devotion to balancing work with fun are the qualities that allowed him to have a long and distinguished military and civil-service career–and to make meaningful headway in establishing racial equality in the Navy. For all those accomplishments, however, there is very little sense of teleology here. Byrd simply tells his story and lets the threads lead where they may. Readers not accustomed to the desultory oral storytelling style of the South are likely to be annoyed by the apparent lack of focus, especially given the exaggerated haphazardness of this narrative. It is clear that the author is a storyteller firmly ensconced in the oral tradition and that much is lost in the translation of his story into print.
Remarkable neither in prose nor plotting, this memoir is still compelling and inspiring.Pub Date: March 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4257-8588-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
