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RESCUE MEN

Some poignant stories, lots of ambition, but the result is but a flicker of a flame.

The evolving fortunes of a large Boston firefighting family, the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, the changing racial politics of Bean Town, the redemptive powers of work and writing—all intermixed with accounts of the derring-do of fire-and-rescue teams.

Kenney—whose grandfather was among the first on the scene at the Cocoanut Grove and whose father and other relatives have worked in fire-related professions—takes a holiday from the writing of fiction thrillers (The Last Man, 2001, etc.) to construct his own family saga. He seems to have epic aspirations—a multigenerational story with weighty themes of life and death and sacrifice and sin and redemption (all seared by flames)—but the writing is so conventional, so unrelievedly ordinary, that the balloon of his narrative never inflates. The family’s involvement with the Cocoanut Grove fire is of signal importance. The author’s grandfather sustained injuries there that forced his early retirement. And years later, the author’s father (Sonny) became obsessed with the story of the fire, particularly with its origin (still uncertain at the time), and spent more than a dozen years researching the tragedy—interviewing survivors, reading all relevant documents and even promoting the theory that methyl chloride was the principal villain. Sonny, who’d never had any literary aspirations, even published a few articles on the subject. (He, too, had retired early from the Boston Fire Department for injury-related reasons.) Kenney deals with the ugly racial issues prominent in Boston during the 1970s and ’80s (forced busing, hiring quotas). A couple of his brothers failed to gain BFD positions because a judge had determined that the virtually all-white department must integrate, even if it meant employing less-qualified members of minority groups. The Kenneys, one and all, were outraged. The author deals, as well, with Sonny’s long-running (and often losing) battle with alcoholism. Late in life, he joined AA, which seems to be helping.

Some poignant stories, lots of ambition, but the result is but a flicker of a flame.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007

ISBN: 1-58648-310-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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