A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.
Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Powers initiates a desperate manhunt for his suicidal gay twin brother, who has vanished seven years after their tumultuous college days.
Alerted by his brother’s colleague, Powers discovers that his brother—they were born five minutes apart, both gay—has mysteriously disappeared. Knowing what he knows about Tim and his emotional issues, Kim suspects his brother has gone on a drinking binge due to anxiety over some changes in his life, including a new apartment. There’s much history between them. After their mother died young (of indeterminate causes), feelings of guilt and confusion surfaced, and both brothers resigned to believing they were the product of a “cursed childhood.” Growing up together, then separating after college, Kim moved in with his lover, a costume designer in Manhattan, and moody brother Tim relocated to Kentucky for a “crashed and burned” lifestyle of heavy drinking, self-mutilation and extravagant letter-writing to his brother before finally moving to New York and getting a job with a middling film director. Upon Tim’s disappearance, Kim notifies their older brother, anxiously questions friends, scours Tim’s apartment, his day-planner and bundles of secret letters, then smartly goes back to his brother’s college research papers, since this latest disappearance coincided with the same time of year as Tim’s emotional breakdown while away at college—the year he’d described as “swimming in time and space.” Picking up clues here and there, Kim follows a “path of bloody breadcrumbs” from a Greenwich Village bar, then sniffing around painful, long-buried memories back at Austin College in Texas, and on to some difficult soul-searching of his own. Powers amplifies his quest with frantic energy and such a desperate sense of urgency that when Tim is finally discovered, their tearful reunion seems anticlimactic at first—but more heartbreak is close behind.
A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-78671-723-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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