Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls...
A humorous yet unsettling look back at a minor-league grifter family in a major-league crooked town—pre-reform Jersey City.
Stapinski’s debut invokes sensitive questions about class, domesticity, and the tolerance of corruption essential to machine politics. She artfully reconstructs her hardscrabble 1970s childhood above a tavern, and her close-knit, rambunctious family, entangled by the graft-ridden Hudson County government (her mother worked for the DMV, and an aunt was a longtime “fixer”). But to a large degree she portrays her family, like her native city, as cursed—and she explores veins of darkness behind the hearty façade: the community’s reliance on stolen goods (and the endorsement of criminality that implied), her taciturn father’s dependence on alcohol, and the violence embodied by a hate-filled grandfather (whose madness was tolerated in the community until he tried to murder members of his own family). Throughout, Stapinski uses her family-based narrative to portray an urban political culture that encouraged theft, election fraud, industrial pollution, and a looting of the tax base, while pacifying underclass residents with city-payroll jobs and mob-mentality hedonism. Along the way, she constructs a vivid picture of pre-gentrification Jersey City: a “scary” place where teenagers attended decaying movie palaces, the streets were full of deformed pencil-sellers and midget news-dealers, stolen goods were sold in the municipal buildings, and loose joints and “the numbers” were available on any street corner. Although evoking the crowded, colloquial feel of “outsider” writing, the author has a fine sense of narrative line and of relevant observation; as a result, her work simultaneously captures the street-level conviviality of the urban working class, and the desperation and violence lurking beneath.
Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls (1999), this is an unusual and relevant urban family history.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46306-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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