Faithful attempt. Still, it could be that you had to be there.
Forced to relocate from downtown Manhattan after 9/11, a career woman discovers warmth, camaraderie and more in a small-town barroom.
Here’s one for you: there’s this tavern run by, of all things, an Irishman. But for Wall Street Journal columnist Bounds (“call me Wendy”), a displaced renter in Garrison, N.Y., after the Twin Towers fell too close to her apartment building, one of the most entrenched clichés in America’s alcohol culture becomes a place of refuge and reflection. As the author plumbs the boozy ambience of Guinan’s, hard by the Hudson River across from West Point, the aging diabetic owner Jim Guinan and his daughter Margaret, a somewhat hard-bitten detective on the local force who essentially runs the place in her off-hours, lead a cast of characters—their customers—who tend to become poets and philosophers instantly upon entry. The good and bad news here is that everyone who has frequented a similar venue to the extent that it becomes known as one’s watering-hole has met and enjoyed—or sometimes been appalled by—people like these. The lawyer, the salesman, the silent war hero, the guy down on his luck, the guy with the bad jokes: all are in residence as components in the slice-of-life Bounds offers with the implication that the reader should look beyond stereotypes, as does she. But it’s not until some 60 pages have gone by in this encounter between the willowy blonde in her early 30s and the predominantly older males who belly up at Guinan’s, that the reader is let in on the fact that she’s in a gay relationship. Later, when she realizes she must, in a lip-biting encounter, explain to Jim that “Kathryn is not my sister,” it provides one of the memoir’s few originally engaging scenes.
Faithful attempt. Still, it could be that you had to be there.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056406-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
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