A rambling homage to love, perseverance and the pursuit of longevity: touching but a bit treacly.
Nearly four decades after the fact, Wall Street Journal copy editor McKee (The Call of the Game, 1987) tries to come to terms with his father’s death and his own mortality.
On September 30, 1969, the 16-year-old author watched his 50-year-old father die suddenly of a heart attack. More than 35 years later, McKee discovered that he too had a less-than-healthy heart and became obsessed with learning everything he could about cardiac disease. Part of his journey involved resurrecting a piece he’d written in college about his father’s death and expanding it into a book. The resultant memoir, which features reminiscences of high-school days, stories about his love of sports and a multitude of information about heart disease, was clearly cathartic and therapeutic for the author, so that readers can’t help but root for him to make it through the story both wiser and healthier. In substantial portions of the text, McKee takes a journalistic approach, offering specific details (dates, addresses, heart disease-related statistics, etc.) in such a smooth manner that the numbers seem to be a natural part of the narrative. There are also plenty of weepy moments, which don’t hurt the narrative since the book would have suffered had he kept more distance. The nonlinear structure allows for the author to jump from topic to topic, including a section of people describing their heart attacks, in-depth descriptions of professional football games past and other loosely related material. Those who suffer from heart disease will undoubtedly find solace in the fact that they’re far from alone. However, this earnest endeavor doesn’t have quite the literary resonance one might have hoped.
A rambling homage to love, perseverance and the pursuit of longevity: touching but a bit treacly.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1097-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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 2026 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.
