Energized by Karr’s sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. More importantly, her...
Fans of Karr’s award-winning The Liars’ Club (1995) will not be disappointed by this feisty, funny, and tender memoir of a drug-ridden coming of age in Leechfield, her Texas hometown.
The author’s much-married mother, bemused father, and angry sister Lecia are all still in place; new characters include surfers who nod out at the beach every weekend, the sweet college boy who was her first lover, and a bouquet of remarkable girlfriends, unlikely blooms among Leechfield’s insular population. Karr’s strange family has pushed her to the social outskirts, and she buries herself in books and fantasies. But they don’t stave off prepubescent self-consciousness, like the terrible shame of the huge pimple on her forehead exposed to her sixth-grade crush, or the pain when her best friend moves on to another best friend, or the humiliation that her first real date is with the town’s ranking dweeb, who is also a proselytizing Mormon. Karr vividly captures those moments that are so important to a girl growing up, and explains why they are important. She candidly depicts a muffed eighth-grade suicide attempt and high-school years passed in a blur of drugs (the time is the late 1960s and early ’70s) as she tried to escape the paralyzing monotony and psychic brutality of life in Leechfield. Accelerating substance abuse leads to arrest and a horrendous, acid-laced night at Effie’s Go-Go bar, whose terrifying patrons inspire Karr to one of those chemically assisted moments of revelation: “There’s no place like home.” She leaves home soon enough, however, bound for California, where her new life as drug-free poet and writer will soon begin.
Energized by Karr’s sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. More importantly, her clear-eyed recollection of what it’s like to change from child into woman resonates with truth.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89274-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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