Of interest mostly to those concerned about the health of American higher education, but Chace’s quiet, modest voice is...
A guided tour of academe, from the author’s years as a student at Haverford in the 1950s through his recent retirement as president of Emory University.
Chace, who has hitherto published only scholarly titles, began this memoir after he stepped down as the head of Emory. (He returned later as a professor of English.) He entered Haverford in the fall of 1956, was suspended for a year—college authorities were not amused by his “borrowing” the dining-hall silverware—and finally got his B.A. in 1961. After that, he made fairly consistent progress up the plane of academic life: a Ph.D. from Berkeley (earned during its wildest free-speech days), a stint at Stillman College in Alabama (where he was arrested during an early civil-rights demonstration), a job at Stanford (he taught the school’s first course in black literature on barely a moment’s notice), a segue into administration, an appointment to head Wesleyan University (some success, some failure), a transfer to Emory for nine of his most gratifying years. During his administrative career, the author continued to teach, generally courses on Ulysses, and so brings a broad perspective to his commentary on higher education today. Chace sees some things he doesn’t like, especially big-time college athletics, which he calls a “cancer.” He also worries about the state of his own particular academic specialty, English-teaching, which in his judgment has nearly abandoned its traditional emphasis on literary history for a food-court curriculum, political correctness and the arcana of literary theory. In sum, however, he is sanguine, dismissing portraits of dissolute campus life like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons as “grotesquely cartoonish.” Although the subtitle’s characterization of Chace’s experiences as “adventures” is perhaps over-generous, he did hold some nitro he needed to handle carefully: Gay unions proclaimed in a college chapel? Tenure for all? Investing in South African businesses?
Of interest mostly to those concerned about the health of American higher education, but Chace’s quiet, modest voice is intelligent and appealing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-691-12725-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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