Brown brings to his first work of nonfiction the same no- nonsense style that makes his novels and short stories (Big Bad Love, 1990, etc.) so powerful and intense. This episodic memoir of his life as a firefighter is also a testament to family, courage, and hard work, and Brown isn't afraid to risk being sappy, albeit in a manly way. A self-taught writer, Brown supported himself and his family for 16 years as a fireman in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. A veteran of the Marines, he found the same brotherhood in the station house, and also a similar test of muscle, brain, and heart. A firefighter can be ``a prick, a thief, a liar,'' but he can't be a coward. Each fire ``has to be faced and defeated,'' and you never ``forget death and pain, or fear.'' Brown sings the praises of his tools—the beauty of knots, hoses, and sirens. He inventories the back rooms, and re-creates the boredom of waiting as well as the pleasures of cooking for the boys and watching sex and violence on the VCR. But nothing beats the adrenaline rush of a call, whether to a burning building or a car wreck: Both require a reflex-like response, and the joy of saving lives cannot be equalled. Interspersed throughout the rambling narrative are anecdotes from Brown's life: his guilt over killing a mouse; his early joy in hunting and fishing; his love for his family and his squirrel dog. The funny tale of his temporary separation from his wife has all the hard-luck pathos of the author's best short stories. Brown confesses to drinking too much and to being otherwise content with his life. Yet he reluctantly abandoned firefighting to become a full-time writer—and he's done extraordinarily well at it since. A remarkable addition to the literature of work. This may not be the first book by a fireman—but it's one of the best. (First printing of 25,000)
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-009-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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