A largely resonant, darkly comic remembrance that embodies the struggle between pursuing reliable employment and devoting...
The author explores the white-and blue-collar job markets while also trying to find fulfilling employment as a writer in this debut memoir.
It’s said that if you love what you do, then you’ll never work a day in your life. By that yardstick, Driver has spent most of his adult life hard at work. This lively, albeit sometimes-digressive, memoir offers “bits and pieces of a working life, job-related stories, lessons and misadventures of an aspiring writer…trapped in the life of a barn-hauling truck driver” in the South. It’s studded with pop-culture references, scholarly footnotes, cogent quotes from authors with whom Driver feels a kinship (Henry David Thoreau, Barbara Ehrenreich, Studs Terkel), personal photos, and illustrations by his wife, Tarri Driver. The author draws a distinction between a mere job and meaningful work, but this isn’t a screed of millennial entitlement; he credits his grandfather with imparting the value of a strong work ethic (“He showed me what it felt like to be satisfied by a job well done”). His fraught, often-bumpy journey will strike a chord with many readers—especially college graduates who have labored under the impression that their degrees would, for want of a better phrase, pay off. Driver laments, “A hell of a lot of good a Master of Arts degree in English does when your job is to deliver portable storage barns from a truck in the middle of nowhere.” Overall, he walks a fine line in this book; he’s grateful for the work that enables him to pay his bills, despite feeling defeated that he’s unable to make his education work for him, but at the same time, he’s cognizant of the millions of people who “struggle every day at crap jobs that pay next-to-nothing because it is the only option they have.” However, in describing the colorful characters he encounters and recreating their Southern-fried patois, he comes perilously close to caricature (“Sorry bout all ‘at chicken shit over thar, but that’s wore I need it tuh set”), and his habit of jumping from present to past jobs and back again robs the book of some momentum.
A largely resonant, darkly comic remembrance that embodies the struggle between pursuing reliable employment and devoting oneself to one’s passions.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63505-034-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
