A brush with death causes southern novelist McLaurin (Woodrow's Trumpet, 1989; The Acorn Plan, 1988) to reflect, with unflinching honesty and seductive, unsentimental passion, on what his North Carolina heritage has meant to him. Forget those treasured images of mint juleps and magnolia blossoms. McLaurin's Cape Fear River Valley in rural North Carolina is a land where young boys take part in breech-birthing hogs, dance excitedly around dead-drunk daddies passed out in their own vomit, refuse to eat food touched by black hands—and end up in jail, church, the military, or, most likely, dead by age 35. Raised in a two-bedroom farmhouse with four brothers, a sister, a dad who worked in a bakery and tried to raise a little money off the land, and without an indoor bathroom, McLaurin met a different fate for no better reason, he claims, than an inexplicable need to challenge himself with the unfamiliar. While his younger brothers seemed content to accept the working-class lives that awaited them, McLaurin escaped by becoming a basketball hero in high school, a Marine after graduation, a collector of poisonous snakes while working as a Pepsi salesman, and a Peace Corps volunteer after he married his second, upper-middle-class wife. Still, McLaurin remained much more a part of the rural South than apart from it, as he realized at age 36 when he was diagnosed with cancer and his family gathered around to donate the bone marrow that would save him and to offer commiseration and comfort. His gratitude is mirrored here in these unsanitized recollections of the schoolhouse cruelties, bloody cockfights, drunken brawls, gruesome deaths and suicides, and moments of beauty that make up the life he nearly lost. A powerful work—and a welcome record of a rapidly fading way of life.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02996-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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