Most collections of previously published essays are necessarily uneven. This one is no exception, but the best pieces are...
An essayist focuses on family dynamics and the mortality that challenges us all.
Crenshaw (co-author: Text, Mind, and World: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, 2007) teaches writing at the university level, and the best of these essays, previously published in the Southwest Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere, provide textbook examples of the craft. Perhaps the best is “Choke,” a series of sleight-of-hand fragments through which the author shows students (and readers) how to distinguish among “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This essay only meets one of those requirements.” As the narrative proceeds, hopscotching across chronology, it reveals Crenshaw’s responsibility in a different way than the matter-of-fact earlier passages had suggested, showing how “in court that would be a lie of omission. In an essay it’s called craft.” The author is a consummate craftsman, whether of concision (the two-page “Where We Are Going”) or in a longer illumination of the elliptical slipperiness of truth: “After the Ice,” which is likely about a murder in the family. A couple of the lesser pieces seem like writing exercises—e.g., about walls (“A Brief and Selected History of Man, Defined by a Few of the Walls He Has Built”) or food (“The Giving of Food”). Many of these essays focus on what it means to be a man from the perspective of someone who was raised in the South, served in the military, and drinks too much, but the title piece shows just how difficult it can be to sustain that hard-boiled persona. “When the shadows start to run together,” he writes, “we will regret the end of this day….We will think of all the time we have wasted, the savings accounts we haven’t yet started, the family members we haven’t visited in years.”
Most collections of previously published essays are necessarily uneven. This one is no exception, but the best pieces are worthy of inclusion in the Best American Essays series.Pub Date: March 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5521-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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