Jazz critic and social writer Hentoff recalls his early years and formative influences in this stream-of-consciousness memoir. In his boyhood, the charmingly corrupt Mayor James Michael Curley ruled City Hall, the sermons of Father Coughlin ruled the radio (at least on Sundays), and the neighborhood of Roxbury, where Nat grew up, was already considered a ghetto—for Jews. Today a regular contributor to the Village Voice, Hentoff reveals himself as a rebel from way back, at age 13 organizing his fellow candystore clerks (and winning them a 10¢ wage increase). But life was mainly bounded by the twin "J's" of Jazz and Judaism. The young Hentoff collected records even before he owned a record player, so entranced was he by the new sounds of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller: "There were more different colors in this music than in all the Boston Museum of Fine Arts." The relationship with religion was a more troubled love affair, but Hentoff never failed to thrill at the rabbi's prayer-chant at services or the klezmorim musicians that performed during weddings. The link between the love of the Yiddish bands and the Big Bands is not, he insists, that far-fetched. "So where do you think Benny Goodman came from?," a klezmer clarinetist asks him. When it sticks to memories like that, the book is charming and moving. But as it goes along, Boston Boy shrinks in scope, becomes more of a recital of the increasingly smart-ass author's triumphs—Hentoff receiving the confidences of wise old jazz musicians, Hentoff conning the Fulbright Scholarship office into early acceptance. Especially self-indulgent is a section on a Jewish high-school student in 1984, who endured threats and hate mall because she refused to recite the Hedge of Allegiance. Hentoff has extensively written about the incident ever since; the sole rationale for its inclusion here seems to be his stated credo that "Ever since [college], everyone's free-speech rights have been my business." Such egotism ultimately sours Boston Boy. In the grand scheme of things, Hentoff's life isn't exactly time-capsule material; even so, this jazz buff should learn the difference between memoir-writing and personal horn-blowing.
Pub Date: April 15, 1986
ISBN: 096796752X
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986
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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