Not the weightiest of tomes, but quite delightful and very amusing.
Fresh and funny memoirs of a childhood in America’s heartland, written by one who was born there in 1965 and can still remember the way a child experienced it.
Kimmel, a former student of creative writing at Ball and North Carolina State Universities, has written about what she knows best—Zippy Jarvis and the little world she grew up in. The Jarvis family lived in Mooreland, Indiana, a town of 300 people, three churches, and one four-way intersection with stop signs. Just what they were doing there isn’t clear, but the author’s portraits of her hot-tempered, gambling father and her sedentary, depressive mother are vivid. While young Zippy did not see her parents’ quirks as failings, the adult author makes their shortcomings abundantly clear. Through her eyes, the reader also meets the scary old woman who lives across the street and is believed to eat puppy stew; her friend Rose, remarkable for being not only left-handed but Catholic; the neighboring Hicks family with their eight children (“all excellent”), who leave their aged dog in Zippy’s care; and her grandmother Mildred, whose house was once picked up by a tornado and moved twenty feet, landing on the family graveyard. All the ordinary stuff of childhood—building a bicycle with her father, throwing up in the local diner, fighting with schoolmates, going to Easter sunrise services with her mother—is recalled and told in the appealing voice of a scrappy, naïve kid. Each chapter begins with an appropriate photograph, usually a candid snapshot, but sometimes a school picture or a posed-for portrait, which serve to remind us that this is not fiction. However, Kimmel’s narrative skills suggest a novel may be next.
Not the weightiest of tomes, but quite delightful and very amusing.Pub Date: March 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49982-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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