A long-winded but immersive chronicle.
The story of an African-American born shortly before the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Davidson’s (When Clans Collide, 2013, etc.) second memoir of a planned trilogy picks up where his previous book left off: his parents’ migration to the industrial North from the agricultural South, where they experienced institutional discrimination. At one point, Davidson recounts a moment of “discombobulation” after a classmate socked him on the jaw, leaving him bewildered and angry. These two feelings went on to comprise most of his reactions to events in his life, including his involvement in a neighborhood he dubs “Stupidville,” where drugs ran rampant and danger lurked. Davidson offers abstract descriptions of his interactions in Stupidville, rather than recounting his substance abuse in detail, but his reckless ways led him to blow paychecks earned during stints as a lineman in Detroit car factories and as a general laborer and made him miss the birth of his first daughter. Davidson finally escaped Stupidville, if not all the habits he learned there, when he joined the military in 1979 at the age of 28. The next decade saw him divorce his first wife and marry a woman he met in the military, eventually moving with her and their daughters to a string of Army bases in Germany, Arizona, Alaska, and Missouri. Later, Davidson earned a Ph.D., became a teacher, and joined the Toastmaster’s Club in order to become a practiced public speaker. Throughout this slow-paced book, Davidson often digresses, describing seemingly insignificant vignettes in an almost gossipy tone. The book’s structure breaks up his life into four segments centered mainly on his childhood, young-adulthood, military career, and present-day life. He does weave in colorful details from each era, describing music, reflecting on popular culture, and offering his views of important historical events. Each section ends with a list of milestones, along with what he calls “knucklehead incidents”—the results of foolish choices that he and his cohorts made. Although Davidson’s memoir isn’t explicitly about overcoming substance abuse, it takes a redemptive view of his rise from “Stupidville” while also remaining wary of the threat of slipping back into his old ways. He effectively presents his story as a cautionary tale marred by drugs, violence, anger issues, and infidelity.
A long-winded but immersive chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4582-1913-8
Page Count: 508
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
