Playwright (The Miracle Worker: Two For the Seesaw) William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead is primarily an offertory to his parents, a mother whom no one could touch for "brightness of heart or kitchen," a father always "alive and imperfect," remembered here not only to defy the finality of death but also to retain the continuity of their lives through his-through his children's. It is also an audit of his own growing up and growing away: from the small change of a childhood in the Bronx (marbles, soda pop, and a ten cent allowance) it proceeds to the currency of more universal values. Unabashedly emotional in spots, sometimes rather formless in technique, there are still remarkable scenes: of a grandmother (his mother's mother) who played the horses but never was seen without her of her little black arrings, who survived to bury a husband and fourteen sons: of his father and his long terminal illness when he became "so close to inhuman earth again": and particularly of his mother who scrubbed and cleaned her way through other people's houses as well as her own, fighting for the consanguinity of blood and love, and retaining an indomitable spirit until the end of her "72 years of workaday bones." There will be those who will not respond to the poetic and lyrical insets which follow the schemata of the Catholic mass, but the book, as a testament, as a testimonial, is unarguably affirmative and alive. Literary Guild selection and expected wide appeal.
Pub Date: March 25, 1968
ISBN: 0689705425
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
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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