Offutt follows up his collection of agrarian short stories (Kentucky Straight, 1992—not reviewed) with a picaresque tale of a decade on the road. The author is the protagonist in this engaging and irreverent story, much of which may even be factual. But even if some of the details may not be literally true, as a cynical reader might suspect, the book is sometimes truly literate. Offutt, almost as enamored with Figures of Speech as he is with Mother Nature, devises some similes (``a city as cold as crowbar''; ``predictable as diarrhea'') that are more adroit than others (``The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water color background with too much paint''). The author sprang from the foothills of Appalachia (where the terrain is ``humped like a kicked rug'') before he turned 20. Before he was 30, not so long ago, he passed through New York and Minnesota, California and the Everglades, the plains, mountains, and swamps of America. Drifting his way past redoubts of poverty and outposts of counterculture, Offutt sought his fortune, perhaps as an actor, perchance as a playwright or maybe as a poet. What he found, besides sex, was occasional work as a dishwasher, a mosquito-plagued naturalist, and a faux walrus in a surreal, flea- bitten circus. (A job promotion's upward mobility: He was allowed to sleep under the truck.) The effect is Candide following the path of Orwell down and out in Paris and London. Threaded throughout is the moving journal of Offutt's wife's pregnancy and the birth of the Offutt scion. Finally, Offutt tends his own garden beside a river in America's heartland as he offers an acute reconstruction of things that may have passed. As the old adage has it, you can't step into the same river twice. Even so, a dip into this stream of self-consciousness is an entertaining pastime.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-78734-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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