An insightful and unique examination of family life.
Steward recounts a childhood in Nebraska during the Great Depression in this family memoir.
The Elkhorn River flows from northeastern Nebraska, where the Steward family set down roots to cultivate a farm and raise a family. Growing up with seven siblings, Steward’s life is filled with anecdotes– amusing and touching–about the geography and the people around him. A collection of various types of writing–character sketches, poems, family stories–this book forgoes the cut-and-dry narrative of a typical memoir and instead becomes something more atmospheric. Rather than employing tiresome and monotonous descriptions of daily life, he uses quick and quirky slice-of-life vignettes to create a vivid and detailed portrait of his family. While the book’s in peril of teetering into unforgivable sentimentality at any given moment, the author smartly balances the material. Sweet bits of verse about his mother and father are a few pages from an uproarious account about a tug-of-war match between the fat women and skinny women in the local church’s congregation. Early on, Steward states that his “purposes in telling these stories…are, one, to prod the memories of [his] siblings and, two, to share with [their] parents’ progeny the values that guided [their] lives.” It’s a simple, if quaint, task, but the end product amounts to much more than family trivia. While the stories clearly belong to only the Steward clan, they also provide a thorough and relatable account of a particular time and place in American history–especially when the Great Depression comes into heavy play. Though it might not be of serious interest to many scholars of the American Midwest in the 20th century, this earnest, good-humored and readable book is a fine example of oral history, aptly proving that an old man’s ramblings can be entertaining and valuable.
An insightful and unique examination of family life.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4363-0766-6
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
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