The adventure and peril of everyday living captured in language that's light, beautiful, and razor-sharp.
Lyrical, gripping tale of the year Cohen's life went to hell.
One minute she was living an idyll, lazing through her days as a rural-upstate New York reporter and nights in a secluded farmhouse with a loving husband and infant daughter; the next, her Alzheimer's-afflicted father had moved in, her husband had moved across the country to shack up with an 18-year-old, and winter buried the house in snow. Cohen and her youthful husband had been a Manhattan couple with an active social life. After the move to Beartown Road and Dad's appearance, her city sophistication was entirely irrelevant in the endless battle to keep her father and daughter fed, dry, and safe, to get through the winter without freezing to death (apparently a surprisingly easy thing to do in a civilized North American town), neglecting her family, or losing her job. Cohen takes what could be a self-indulgent sob story and turns it into the stuff of high adventure. When she lies to her father about the eldercare group he attends, telling him he is the group's teacher, the reader prays the fiction will hold so that she can go to work secure in the knowledge that he won’t accidentally burn the house down while smoking unattended. When neighbors plow her driveway after big snowfalls, we’re swept with gratitude for the author’s sake. Cohen frames the whole of her messy, absorbing year in the framework of how we learn and forget. As her daughter gains words, her father loses them. As her daughter acquires motor skills, her father stumbles. As she describes the waxing of her daughter's personality and the waning of her father's, the fact he cannot remember her name or learn her daughter's, Cohen manages never to resort to sentimentality.
The adventure and peril of everyday living captured in language that's light, beautiful, and razor-sharp.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50727-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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.
