Quinn—winner of the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow award for his novel Ishmael (1992)—tells the story of his psychological journey from a loveless childhood into '50s Catholicism and finally to his present creed of animism and self-discovery. Quinn tells us that, as a child in Omaha, Nebr., he was ignored by his mother, despised by his father, and loathed by his peers. He felt that he could win love and acceptance only by making himself perfect. He turned to Catholicism in his early teens, believing he could compel God to love him by excessive religiosity. He spent a few weeks at the famous Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. There he had a vision of the world ablaze with divine fire, but soon he was told by Thomas Merton, the novice master, that he needed to live life more before becoming a monk. Quinn relates how he then went into publishing, Freudian analysis, and two ill-starred marriages (jettisoning his Catholicism en route) before he ``joined the human race'' and realized that he was lovable just by being normal. Quinn devotes the last part of his book to a poorly thought through vision of human beings as part of the world—not dominating it—supporting this by a necessarily vague appeal to the countless centuries when humans were hunter- gatherers and invoking the unscientific term ``animism'' to denote his ideal of an imminent and possibly atheistic religion; yet he proclaims that ``looking at the universe, I find nothing in it that indicates the numinosity of the divine.'' Quinn takes himself very seriously as the author of Ishmael and is fond of quoting it. The bitterness of his attacks on education and religion as mere bundles of prohibitions that suppress spontaneity suggests that he is still reacting against his strong superego. Likely to interest only devotees of Ishmael.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-10018-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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