A big, eminently readable story, deftly spun even if with few surprises.
A tale of boom and bust—but mostly bust—in the always-beckoning oil fields of Texas.
In this epic, comparatively modest in size but ambitious in scope, Lone Star State native and itinerant correspondent Mealer (Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town, 2012, etc.) traces his family’s checkered history across generations, planting cotton, fighting wars, grieving for the fallen, and always looking for better things. “Only in Texas was there enough space for so many second acts,” he writes. Any reader of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia cycle of novels will know just what Mealer means, and in the largest sense, his story is pretty familiar ground: People get desperate in the absence of money and careless in the presence of it. The author takes his time setting a textured backdrop for his story: Oil came late to Texas, but when it arrived, it did so with more than a vengeance. Edna Ferber might have modeled Giant on some of Mealer’s characters, including a would-be baron whose sexual escapades got him thrown out of a country club, to which he replied, “I’ll build my own place.” The story eventually settles on Mealer’s father, who worked endlessly to make his own luck but almost always hit a bad streak when in the company of his best friend, a dashing, likable, yet unreliable fellow who was always on the make, selling one lease with one hand to buy another with the other, hiring staff without quite knowing what they could do, and buying planes and houses with money that wasn’t quite his. It was the Texas boom-and-bust tale all over again, punctuated with fistfuls of speed and long lines of cocaine; as Mealer writes, sagely, “it was hard to stay focused on Jesus when you were busy drilling for oil.” True enough: One minute Reagan is newly in office and you’re flush, the next he’s in trouble and you’re broke, and maybe you’ll see the ghost of Bob Wills on the way to the poorhouse—or the bank.
A big, eminently readable story, deftly spun even if with few surprises.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-05891-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2018
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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