In a style that is literary but never pedantic, Stielstra has crafted a collection that has such a sense of continuity that...
Perhaps not lifesaving, but a life-enriching collection of essays by a conscientious writer and teacher who knows that asking the right questions is more important than having all the answers.
Stielstra (Once I Was Cool, 2014) has often performed her pieces as well as published them, and her strong sense of voice and engagement with her audience reflect that experience. She is an ardent feminist, but her pieces rarely seem exclusionary; they are not directed toward any particular gender, race, economic class, generation (though rites of passage in 21st-century bohemian Chicago figure heavily), or even political persuasion. The author wants people to communicate, to connect, and to face their fears, not only of each other, but the ones deep inside. When she was in the process of losing her job within the writing program at a college where she’d spent almost two decades, she writes, “I outlined a book proposal, a collection of essays about fear.” That proposal became this book. So what is she afraid of? Writing. Those who might be offended by her writing. Not writing well enough. Falling in love. Getting married. Having a baby. Cancer. Men who grope. Her response to men who grope. Sex. Not enough sex. Sex with the strings of love attached. Mortgages. Property values. Her dad’s heart and his hunting adventures in Alaska. Guns. When her young son asked what an essay is, she responded, “It’s a kind of question.” He responded, “Okay. Did you find the answer?” After having her baby, Stielstra asks, “How do you write about depression in a way that’s not depressing?” Her own essay is the answer. She also maintains, “at some point, our education no longer belongs to teachers. It belongs to us.” The author sounds like a marvelous teacher, and her collection offers plenty of teaching moments.
In a style that is literary but never pedantic, Stielstra has crafted a collection that has such a sense of continuity that it could pass as a memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242920-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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