A greenhorn professor finds unexpected camaraderie and community when he takes a teaching job in Utah, challenging his preconceptions of small-town life.
Work (Windmills, the River & Dust: One Man’s West, 2005, etc.) serves up a gently humorous take on the classic “stranger in a strange land” narrative as he details his transition from an upstart English major in the 1960s to the lone non-Mormon professor at the College of Southern Utah. Accepting the position in conservative Cedar City on a whim, Work and his family sojourned outside of their comfort zone to experience a West that, while geographically not so distant, bore little cultural resemblance to their Fort Collins home. The Cedar Citizens forswore caffeine, tobacco and alcohol; attended their temple nearly every day; hunted jack rabbits with heavy artillery; and, in homage to the beehive’s omnipresence as Utah’s national emblem, sported heavily shellacked hairdos long after hippies had made straight, untamed hair fashionable. Despite some initial culture shock at the lack of coffee in the teacher’s lounge—a situation that the author countered by holding clandestine cocktail parties at his house for those willing to occasionally stray—Work came to respect his colleagues’ devotion to their faith as well as their industriousness and willingness to welcome an outsider. Musing on the prominence of deserts in religious mythology, he also explores the mystique of the Utah landscape and its powerful hold on the imagination, as well as the hidebound language that traditionally divides women’s accomplishments from men’s. Throughout this slim memoir, Work displays a genuine affection for his colleagues and neighbors that simultaneously allows him to spoof their eccentricities. Distinctly regional in tone yet universal in scope, the book offers a cozy homage to a more innocent time and place.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4194-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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