Two brothers—one a family therapist (Howard), the other head of the Center for Jewish Renewal in Philadelphia and author of These Holy Sparks, 1983, etc. (Arthur)—come to terms with their past and present relationship. Despite a loving mother's constant plea to ``be close to your brother above all!,'' the Waskows have felt overriding anger and resentment toward each other throughout most of their lives. The early chapters here—told in the authors' alternating voices- -reconstruct childhood memories. While Howard devotes his boyhood Saturdays to playing sports, Arthur, always the outsider, passes his at the local library, ``disconnected from other people''; also painstakingly recalled are the boys' vibrant mother, Honey—who spends much of their youth fighting tuberculosis—and their infrequent trips to the local Orthodox synagogue. We're offered intimate, poignant glimpses of family tragedies—ranging from life- threatening illnesses to a suicide—but there's an inexplicable void regarding the brothers' wives, divorces, and children. At the nadir of their relationship, Howard once retaliates with, ``I really may have to kill you some day after all.'' But only a few years later, at midlife, the Waskows' relationship turns on the family's wrenching decision not to prolong Honey's life on a respirator—a crisis that forges a new bond between the brothers. Particularly interesting here are the Waskows' divergent responses to Judaism. Neither brother seems to have come to terms with the other's approach: To Howard, Judaism is an avoidable burden; to Arthur, it's a life-affirming force. When Howard remarries, the only Jewish reference at his wedding is a prayer devised by Arthur in their mother's memory. Arthur suggests that Howard's Judaism is limited to nostalgia, but Howard protests that his wedding banquet is richly Jewish, ``overspilled with whitefish, chopped liver...knishes, kishke, and challah.'' To the now mature Arthur, a leading figure in American Jewish renewal, this response is theologically bankrupt but no longer a personal insult. Despite enduring differences, the Waskows offer an appealing human drama in writing themselves back to fraternity.
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-933997-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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