Childhood memories dominate, but the last years of his parents bring to the fore the melancholy that has been there all...
Dry, droll observations from the author’s childhood, with an undercurrent of understated sadness.
This could have been titled “Portrait of the Humorist as a Young Child,” though New Yorker cartoonist Kaplan (I Love You, I Hate You, I’m Hungry, 2010, etc.) doesn’t try too hard to be too funny. It also doesn’t fit the conventions of the graphic memoir, since it has a textual format with frequent, generally small, drawings rather than cartoon panels with words. In addition to his magazine work, the author has also shown his comic sensibility as a TV screenwriter (Girls, Seinfeld), and screens small and large are more prominent throughout these pages than any memories of development as an artist. “As I guess is obvious, I loved TV,” he writes. “I wanted to crawl in the TV and stay there permanently. I guess in a way when I grew up and became a TV writer, I finally did.” The fact that entertainment plays such a formative role in Kaplan’s life suggests how emotionally impoverished he found his family. His mother was “discombobulated” by the strains of raising three boys, while his father went off to work, his own ambitions of becoming a writer thwarted by the demands of supporting a family. The whole family seemed to make do, letting broken things remain that way, enduring their lives rather than particularly enjoying them. The author’s parents never had visitors to the house except for a neighboring couple on New Year’s Eve, when they would “bring out the plastic champagne glasses. I got Cheez-Its on New Year’s Eve. Cheez-Its represented total, utter wild abandon.” Readers of a similar background will find that these memories strike a responsive chord, along with the desire to find something less stultifying.
Childhood memories dominate, but the last years of his parents bring to the fore the melancholy that has been there all along.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16951-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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