by Blake Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 1995
British poet and literary editor of the Sunday Independent, Morrison records in stark and beautiful prose the ugly details of his father's slow death from stomach cancer. To the embarrassment of his wife and children, Dr. Arthur Morrison impatiently cut ahead in lines, delighted in beating the ticket-taker at the racetrack or golf course, and, a zestful do-it- yourselfer, pinched pennies on building a new house or putting in the garden. His son dreaded camping trips: Ill-planned, they usually ended at the nearest pub, his father chatting up the locals and, as was his habit, drinking far too much. The mystery of his decades-long relationship with ``Aunt'' Beaty—a ``friend'' of the family scarcely tolerated by Mummy—remains a nagging question. Yet when his father takes sick at age 75, the most disturbing thing is to see him depressed: ``I want him to be dead rather than die like this.'' Morrison doesn't spare the reader, or himself, any intimate or unpleasant detail of the sickness: the ``railway track'' stitched on his father's bloated belly; his inability to urinate and the current state of his penis; the smells and stains on the bedclothes. When he dies, ``he is dead—no rage against the dying of the light, no terror or delirium, only a night-light smothered in its own wax.'' Then, morbidly, the author repeatedly examines the corpse as it lies at home awaiting cremation. Morrison, who admits to becoming a ``death bore'' to his friends, has a purpose in relating all this: He heartrendingly pins down ``the last moment when [his father] was still unmistakably there,'' that last instant before illness transformed his robust, idiosyncratic father into a sick, dying old man. At times wretchedly disturbing, but resurrected by Morrison's graceful writing and eloquent frankness.
Pub Date: June 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13023-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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by Jessica Hendra with Blake Morrison
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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