American expatriate Green records searing conflicts between heart and spirit as he finally comes to recognize his sexual identity in this third volume of autobiography (The Green Paradise, 1992; The War at Sixteen, 1993). Though born and raised in France, Green was filled by his American parents with tales of family history and Southern lore. So, arriving on these shores in 1919, Green felt instinctively at home, especially in the South. In old family residences in Virginia and Savannah he met relatives, viewed treasured memorabilia, and savored the distinctively southern ethics his parents had imbued in him. But as a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Green was less sure of his place. Though only 19, he had fought in WW I, his sensibility and tastes were European, and he missed France; but, he admits, looking out over Charlottesville on his first morning, ``devoted as I was to France, I recognized that a part of me had no other origin than the country in which I now found myself.'' Shy and self-conscious, Green at first avoided his fellow students and concentrated instead on his classes and spiritual growth. A devout convert to Catholicism, he considered becoming a priest, but he was also agonizingly conscious of his intense attraction to young men. And his unsparing recollections of his sexual ignorance, his desperate attempts to subsume his feelings in religious practice, and his growing awareness of the existence of others like him, make this volume a remarkable record of self-discovery. Finally able to befriend- -platonically—his beloved Mark, who ``reappears constantly'' in his later writings, Green finds a measure of contentment before returning to France. Self-portrait of the artist as a young man, rendered with an excoriating candor that makes Green such a master and exemplar of the confessional voice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-7145-2987-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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