A searching, occasionally profound collection/memoir.
A United Nations staffer and novelist meditates on the question of “how…the life we live relate[s] to lives we might have lived or ought to have lived.”
When Browner (Everything Happens Today, 2011, etc.) turned 50, “thoughts of the road not taken” began to weigh on his mind. He had lived a bohemian lifestyle and committed himself to pursuing literary greatness throughout most of his 20s. But as he neared 30, he found himself drifting into what became a successful career as an international civil servant. In this collection of seven essays, Browner takes a critical look at his existential malaise as well as the motivations and choices that have defined his life. He examines the romanticism and self-involvement that governed his youthful thinking and caused him to scorn what Roger Shattuck called “recognized channels of accomplishment.” A strong but unacknowledged need for the familial tranquility the author did not have in childhood guided him toward a more conventional life as a husband, father, and provider. Writing became a secondary pursuit, but its presence in his life and the unlived possibilities it seemed to suggest haunted him. Literarily informed and philosophically engaged, Browner’s essays are infused with a rueful ambivalence as well as an all-too-human longing for possible pasts and futures. Yet in no way does he regret his choices. Maturity has allowed the author to see that at any given point, “there is not one future ahead of us, but multiple futures.” Creating alternate storylines for our lives is really about “creating a universe that will allow us to be our best selves.” Since choices have consequences, finding happiness means accepting those consequences as part of a process of personal growth. As for the conflicts that arise as we distinguish between what we need and what we desire and then prioritize them, they are what ultimately “give the game its tension” and make life meaningful.
A searching, occasionally profound collection/memoir.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227569-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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