A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.
A Buffalo-based writer’s affecting if protean memoir about Parisian life and love during the decade of liberation.
Stevenson’s life in western New York was a turbulent one. As a child, he was emotionally scarred by his blue-collar father, who continually told him he was worthless–he then watched his mother die of polio complications. Eager to dismiss him, his father shipped Stevenson off to a Connecticut boarding school at 13. Years later, the author left the East Coast, falling in love with a German teacher during a short-lived stint at a college in northern California. He returned to New York, but in short order his perpetually disappointed father tricked Stevenson into being committed to a psychiatric ward, convinced he was mentally unstable. Months passed and Stevenson was eventually deemed of sound mind. He hurriedly boarded an oil tanker where he worked until disembarking at Le Havre, France, and then moved to Paris, where freedom embraced his lonely, searching heart. Living a Francophile’s life, he barely subsisted on bread, cheese and cheap wine, living humbly in “something like a room in a cellar.” Stevenson traversed his new environs alone until encountering a young blond model named Cynthia, whom he’d seen wandering the halls of the same New York psychiatric ward he’d attended. Stevenson was instantly smitten, though soon received word from a relative of his acceptance into Harvard. But at 19, the allure of Paris drew him in further, despite the fact that Cynthia’s increasingly erratic behavior hinted at more serious problems. Neither her free-spirited good friends Ode, Charlie and Gloria nor a possible Vietnam War draft could divide them, but while their attraction deepened, minor indiscretions caused an undeniable rift. Though Paris offered all the charm, wonderment and romantic possibility Stevenson could have ever wanted, he departed brokenhearted. The memoir’s timeline evolves in fits and starts, but Stevenson eventually warms to the form and goes on to dictate a life of yearning love and personal enrichment. Its preciseness and melodramatic feel, however, strains its credibility.
A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-486588
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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.
