A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.
A middle-age man and his father bond over the building of the son’s coffin.
Giffels (English and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of Akron; The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt, 2014, etc.) has written for a wide variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Grantland, and Beavis and Butt-Head (an association that he illuminates in these pages). However, in this highly personal book, he casts himself as very much his father’s son, a can-do man of the Midwest, someone who is happiest when he is busy with some sort of project. The author calls it “ ‘the family disease.’ A restlessness, a compulsion to keep doing things, doing new things and newer things yet, a discomfort with comfort.” So he and his father decided to build a coffin together—but not one for the father, an 81-year-old widower whose own life had been threatened by cancer. They built one for the author, who was in no immediate need of one, except perhaps for literary purposes and for the need to finish the project before his father died. “One of my goals with this endeavor was to learn from him—practical skills and hopefully more,” writes Giffels. “Whatever he would allow. And just to have reason to spend extra time with him.” Intimations of mortality intensified as the author lost his best friend to cancer, shortly following the death of the author’s mother, which had blindsided him. “Grief,” he writes, “has a way of becoming about everything in one’s daily existence….Everything bathed in the sadness of loss.” So, in addition to providing a bonding opportunity with his father, the coffin became a way of dealing with grief and with mortality.
A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0594-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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