The richness of Masumoto’s earlier memoir (Epitaph for a Peach, 1995) about life as a Japanese-American farmer in California is generally lacking here. The problem: Masumoto never quite settles on a subject or direction. Instead, the narrator ventures all over the place, ranging from a discourse on raisins to an evocation of the community “hall,” and from his “chairmanship” of a neighbor’s funeral to the joys of sweating. Some of it’s interesting; the writing is often quite good, even if disconnected or chronologically challenging. Located in Del Rey in California’s Central Valley, the author’s 80-acre farm—20 acres for peaches, 60 for grapes—was purchased by his father rather inexpensively because fully a fourth of it was considered worthless. Covered in “hardpan,” a layer of clay and minerals hardened into rock, the property was cleared over a period of years, “and now lush green vines grow,” producing as much as two tons of raisins per acre. As Masumoto prunes his grapevines, he thinks of his jiichan, his grandfather Masumoto, who arrived in California 100 years ago to work in a vineyard, though he’d never seen a grape. The author traveled to Japan after his college days at Berkeley to study and work with distant relatives, most of whom scarcely knew his family. Then he resumed working with his father on the farm, enjoying the daily grind. As in his first book, Masumoto writes wonderfully of his crops and the challenges of keeping a small farm going. If it had been presented as a collection of vignettes or essays, this might have summoned up more literary or personal energy. But ill-arranged slices of life do not a memoir make. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04673-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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