An uneven, often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of...
An unusual narrative of loss that becomes both a meditation on the Earth and a benediction for one who won't be around to enjoy it.
Taranto's first book is a poetic memoir steeped in beginnings and endings. The narrative is composed of a series of letters to an unborn child, whom the author addresses as Catalpa, interspersed with illustrated botanical definitions, poems, observations, song lyrics, and bursts of dialogue. This assorted correspondence with a lost child is primarily an explanation (and perhaps an apology) of how the child’s conception began but was ultimately terminated. Taranto writes of how he and his girlfriend met, each helping the other work through their troubles. She loved him despite his alopecia, a medical condition that left him hairless; he stuck by her following a near-fatal bicycle accident that not only broke several bones, but, during the hospital visit, led to the realization that she was pregnant. Taranto memorializes a difficult period in his life, made all the more painful because the abortion was not inevitable. The basic reason was that the couple didn’t really know each other that well, an explanation that seemed to suit her more than him. The book is not an anti-abortion tract; Taranto did not interfere with her decision and offered solace and support. But by its very nature, the story is haunted by lost possibilities. At one point, the author utters a prayer that God take him instead of the baby: "Let me be a father only in memory if she can be a mother in this life. Amen." The prayer went unanswered; the closest Taranto would get to fully realizing the fatherhood of Catalpa is through an act of memory and imagination, for which this one-way epistolary emotional scrapbook will have to suffice.
An uneven, often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of how things happen—or don’t.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-940430-98-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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