The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.
A family death sends a celebrated author back to his boyhood home in Memphis, Tennessee, where many family members and memories await.
Theoretical physicist and novelist Lightman (The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, 2014, etc.) had left Memphis as a young man, telling us later in this emotional, moving tale that he had vowed never to move back. The reason: the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King Jr. Race is a principal character in this unusual, even eccentric, memoir. Although Lightman writes that he invented some characters and lightly fictionalized some episodes, he frankly confronts the ugly racial history of Memphis—and of his own family (they had a black housekeeper). His grandfather and father had owned and managed major movie theaters in the area (the author worked in one as a teen), and Lightman recalls how his father quietly and slowly integrated the venues with very few problems. The author’s organization is a bit like a photo album. There are many short segments beginning in the present tense (which he uses to record his monthlong sojourn at home); he then shifts to the past when something in the present serves as a trapdoor to drop him into the past. Along the way, we meet siblings, quirky aunts and uncles, and cousins. We explore the history of Memphis and some of its notables (including Elvis, whom the author met). About the only Memphis moment of consequence he does not mention is its use as the setting of John Grisham’s The Firm (and the subsequent Tom Cruise film). The cumulative effect of Lightman’s memories is wrenching: Loss and illness and death wander freely in his pages, reminding us of the evanescence of youth and promise.
The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0307379399
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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