Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.
A son searches for insight into his father, who died in 2005, by probing his fascination with the Depression-era Bonus March.
Novelist Langer (Ellington Boulevard, 2008, etc.) is the son of the late Seymour Langer, doctor and dutiful but distant father. The author vividly remembers his father talking about writing, but never completing, a book about the 1932 Bonus March, in which World War I veterans were rousted from Washington, D.C., after demanding early payment of a promised service bonus. Langer dubs the March his father’s “Rosebud,” the mysterious clue hinting at the man’s soul, and he spends most of the book trying to discover why this long-ago event meant so much to his father—did he feel unworthy because he hadn’t served in the military?—meditating on a man he never fully knew and on the meaning of unfulfilled dreams. The author hops around in time, alternating scenes of his childhood, early manhood and the present, as he researches family and friends’ memories of his father while dishing out relevant history about the March. Elements of the story will touch readers with similar experiences, like caring for an aging parent or seeking closure for unresolved parent-child questions. Unfortunately, large sections of the narrative, such as the dead-end leads that Langer pursues, become tedious and self-indulgent. The author concludes that his father was a contented man who may not have wanted to write a book. Indeed, his brother tells him that the uncompleted book probably matters more to him than it did to their dad.
Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52372-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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