A piece of hard work, dredged and sifted often to the dregs of misery—but it registers and holds.
Keen, affecting, suspicious, evocative, subtly cool memoir of Birkerts’s first 30 years.
His complex narrative mimics the action of a mind, “juxtaposing past and present, suddenly extracting from beneath some ordinary moment a gleaming root of memory.” Critic and essayist Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies, 1994, etc.) paints the big picture through the slow accrual of vivid portraits and images anchoring all that is forgotten. Son of immigrants (Latvian was spoken at home), as a kid he was unsettled by the contemplation of their homeland’s legacy of concealment and myth, its otherness when held up against life in suburban Detroit. Birkerts goes bone-deep here—wincingly and embarrassingly at times, even when there are intimations of face-saving—to chart the rawness and immediacy of his childhood. Central to the picture is his father, an explosive taskmaster, although “the explosion is nothing compared to the ongoing expectation of the explosion.” Birkerts rebels, in part because everyone else his age is: “We had all, it seemed, tuned in to FM radio at the same time, gotten fired up by the same bands, read the same few books—On the Road, Howl, Naked Lunch, Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up—and now we were linked in broad solidarity against the corrupt and avaricious system of the elders.” He’s not just running with his tribe, though; young Sven is a sharp kid, expectant and self-submerged. He has passion, so when his handful of relationships founder, the knife twists. Thankfully, even at rock bottom, there is reading, which sustained and fortified him, and Joseph Brodsky, a goad more than a mentor to Birkerts’s writing, which through fits and starts finally finds the essay form. His act of excavation here uncovers a man of analytic intelligence who also listens to the logic of his heart.
A piece of hard work, dredged and sifted often to the dregs of misery—but it registers and holds.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03109-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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