An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-the-scenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary...
A young woman makes a life out of working with death.
Working for an undertaker doesn't seem like it would be a popular choice for a summer job, but 15-year-old Booker (I Am the Poem, 2011, etc.) a writer, poet and photographer, figured if she were going to learn how to cope with the recent death of her beloved aunt, a funeral home might be the best place to do it. So began Booker's nine-year employment in the office of Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. During her time there, Booker greeted hundreds of grieving inner-city families at the door and witnessed the strange and familiar faces of death. Some of them were her peers, gunned down in the tragic street violence plaguing that part of the country. Others were AIDS patients, suicide victims or elders in the church; the only discernible pattern that surfaced in the Wylie clientele was a desire for closure. Booker writes that she felt as though she “had already died a hundred deaths” by the time she was done working at the funeral home. By including plenty of less-heavy details about family life at the home and insights into an industry that most outsiders never consider until they have to, Booker's memoir remains mostly lighthearted and true to a teenage girl's perspective. With death as a backdrop, she fell in love with the funeral director's son, crashed the hearse and struggled with the illness of her mother. Despite the rich material, however, the writing reaches neither a moving depth nor comic height and feels at times as stiff and cold as the bodies in the embalming room.
An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-the-scenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary society in inner-city Baltimore.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-592-40712-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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