This threatens at first to be a one-joke story, but gradually the people become more real, the writing more honest. When it...
A professional, city-living woman up and moves herself and boyfriend to a farm, where everything is way different from what she’s used to. Eventually, she and boyfriend find true happiness. It really happened, she says. The End.
Washington Post Magazine columnist Laskas expanded this tale from a series of articles, although readers might guess that without being told. Writers of humorous articles, like stand-up comics, often aim for the quick laugh, one that cannot be too closely examined. For instance, early on, Laskas wants to illustrate how doggone unsophisticated folks are in Scenery Hill, as compared to Pittsburgh. Her example: in Scenery Hill, a whole bunch of the men she meets have the same first name—Joe. Some of them even have the same last name. (In those cases, they’re usually father and son, but hey, those country folk are something, aren’t they?) Thankfully, those same people eventually acquire a third dimension, and so does Laskas’s story. Amid its description of tractors and animals, it’s a love story, starring Laskas and a fiancé who appears to be the perfect man. He is understanding and cooperative with everyone. (Well, he’s a shrink.) There’s a running joke about his poodle: whenever one of their neighbors expresses astonishment that he owns one, he or Laskas says something like, “It’s a standard poodle, not the little yappy kind.” A similar defense can be made for Laskas’s whole story: in the long run, it’s substantial, not merely a collection of one-liners. In fact it explores such substantive issues as how our childhoods influence our adult lives and the different ways we each—country or city—face love, work, illness, and death.
This threatens at first to be a one-joke story, but gradually the people become more real, the writing more honest. When it stops going for the laughs, it gets them anyway, along with a whole passel of genuine emotions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10904-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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