The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she...
A young essayist with a flair for poetic imagery offers a rites-of-passage collection that could almost be a memoir with a few more dots connected.
Baxter writes often about weather and emotional weather and frequently sees correspondence between the two. The combination is most powerfully dramatic in “From the Blue,” about a thunderstorm that electrocutes a young man working in the fields and the profound effect this has on both the essayist and the closely knit community: “We live on this little island of land, surrounded by waterways, the rivers, the lakes, and oceans, the streams below us, the aquifers. Bodies break and return to water and carbon. We all run out, eventually to the sea or rise up into the clouds.” In the title essay that serves as the collection’s centerpiece, the author writes with more edge and depth than she brings to the rest of the pieces, which mainly seem to concern a series of complicated romances, further complicated by what’s inside her head, culminating in the marriage that is the least detailed of these relationships (and the least romantic), quickly followed without explanation by divorce. It doesn’t bode well when she describes her relationship with the man who will become her husband with a tone that barely rises above resignation: “We are past the point of convincing ourselves that this is love. Which is a relief to some extent, like letting someone know your real name. It was nice having something noble to fight for but at least this is honest, as honest as we need it to be.” However, he may not have been past that point, or at least he likely wasn’t when he proposed marriage. Readers will be happy to learn in the acknowledgments, though not the essays, that love has finally gone right for Baxter, who now has a fiance she thanks “for inspiring me daily to live boldly.”
The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she continues to work on it.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68003-172-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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