Readers will be happily lost in this lively, engrossing book about home and family.
Jack’s debut collection weaves together spirited vignettes recalling his boyhood in Trinidad.
For Gabriel, Jack’s fictional stand-in, there’s no such thing as small beginnings. His recollections come from the years he lives in Toco, a small village on Trinidad, during the second world war. Toco’s remoteness prevents Gabriel from focusing too much on European scuffles, though. While raucous soldiers add an exciting new element to village life, they’re largely seen as a curiosity; there are plenty of more interesting occurrences in these far-from-bucolic island days. A mix of superstition, Caribbean Christianity and island traditions shapes Gabriel’s understanding of the world, turning seemingly normal life events into exhilarating, sometimes harrowing affairs. Zombies, ghosts, ancient village charms, the Obeah man’s visits—he’s a kind of witch doctor—and charismatic priests imbue these stories with an entrancing flavor, while hardscrabble daily requirements, from fetching river water to curing meat for dinner, aren’t described as burdensome tasks but spirit endeavors. Undaunted by daily challenges, he maintains innocence and hopefulness, both of which enable him to make declarations and list dreams bound to awaken nostalgia. There are other mountains to climb, hummingbirds to snatch out of midair, lighthouses to ascend and girls to charm. Readers will enjoy watching Gabriel grow into a young man, and when a rupture in family life forces him to leave Toco behind, readers may find themselves sharing in his dismay. Jack, a skillful writer, capably relates island parlance while injecting his tales with affecting color and passion, not to mention a few black-and-white illustrations. Most of the stories successfully fit together, and Jack’s proclaimed goal to relate what life was like in rural Trinidad in the ’30s and ’40s has been achieved.
Readers will be happily lost in this lively, engrossing book about home and family.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479731640
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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