Intense, sensuous, lyrical, shaped by the sensibility of a poet and the eye of a farmer.
California farmer/memoirist Masumoto (Harvest Son, 1998, etc.) meanders through his fields and memories by way of the five senses.
As agriculture increasingly focuses on big business and the bottom line, Masumoto has become an eloquent voice for that increasingly rare breed, the family farmer. Working the land his parents worked before him, his life revolves around the production of Sun Crest peaches and writing evocative books about the process. Here, the author leads a tactile tour of the farm over time. Vivid passages introduce each of the book's five sections, as Masumoto recalls the smell of wet concrete, the taste of a stringy peach, and all the silences of the country he grew up in. As a member of a Japanese farming community, his experiences are both familiar and new: he recalls spring picnic menus that included sushi and bento boxes, the impact of racist land-ownership laws on his family, and his inability to communicate with his non-English-speaking grandmother during the many long hours they worked the fields side by side. Masumoto is particularly adept at conveying the junction at which tradition and modernity meet, describing the difficulties of choosing how to sticker his fruit and of following it to market, or portraying a visit by ten food editors from national magazines who “found it hard to slow their stride” while touring the farm and even harder to select their own peaches to be delivered overnight to their offices across the country. Most enchanting are his brief essays on family members. “Scent of My Father,” which reports on Dad's tendency to smell of cut grass, mud, and sweat, pays moving homage to the ties of earth and blood.
Intense, sensuous, lyrical, shaped by the sensibility of a poet and the eye of a farmer.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-01960-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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