Dubner’s search may yield what appear to be crumbs, but they’re crumbs with flecks of gold.
The search for a childhood hero comes to little, but the reasons behind it are illuminated.
For Dubner (Turbulent Souls, 1998), there was something special about Franco Harris, the great running back for Penn State and the Pittsburgh Steelers, some special alchemy that stirred Dubner’s soul. What accounted for “the spell he’d cast” over his adolescence, Dubner wonders. What was the gap that Harris filled, or the ghosts of that past that an older Dubner still feels thrum through him at odd moments? Confessions . . . is primarily a psychological memoir, with Dubner unraveling his life and playing it off against Harris and all that the athlete represented to him. His father died when Dubner was 13, just when the man had emerged from a long depression and had shone brightly for a few years, his death stealing away the fatherly spark that Dubner still needed (“Take me, lead me, teach me, protect me, give me permission”). Harris seemed the perfect surrogate. He was “owned by no one” and “He thought for himself, upended expectations, bowed to no pressure other than those he generated.” Further, he was humble and thoughtful, plus being a crackerjack running back, the one who pulled off the “Immaculate Reception” and led the champion Steelers. He also guarded his privacy, had a talent for making appointments and breaking them, and kept the obsessed Dubner at arm’s length. As a result, Dubner does a lot of soul-searching: Just why was he dogging poor Harris anyway? He concludes that it was in an attempt to know and understand his role model in a way he wishes he could have done with his father—to gather up some love and fill a few cracks in his life.
Dubner’s search may yield what appear to be crumbs, but they’re crumbs with flecks of gold.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-688-17365-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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