An artful memory piece about a unique home life.
A scion of a venerable British family presents a chronicle of his afflicted brother and their unusual childhood home.
“Our house,” writes Fiennes (The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, 2002), “was almost seven hundred years old.” It was, in fact, the ancestral family castle, equipped with suits of armor, rusting halberds and flaking portraits of severe forebears. There was a gift shop in the stables and a broad moat where Fiennes swam and fished as a child. He climbed the roofs, bicycled in the Great Hall, explored the secret corridors of the attic Barracks and played in the King’s Chamber. Care of the ancient house was important, but not as important as the care of the author’s older brother, who was subject to severe epileptic seizures. Richard was also afflicted with frontal lobe brain damage, perhaps due to medications or the injuries received during severe tonic-clonic attacks. In addition to his graceful evocation of their stately Tudor home and his brother’s experience with a debilitating illness, Fiennes writes elegantly about Mum on the viola in the music room and Dad on the bridge welcoming tourists and film crews. It’s a verdant, elegiac recollection, sometimes suddenly shifting from one narrative state to another, leaping oddly—but fluidly—to the present tense from the past. Interspersed is a précis of the history of research regarding his brother’s status epilecticus.
An artful memory piece about a unique home life.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-07258-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
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