Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a “decent library.”
A collection of literary tapas.
Novelist and short story writer Orner (Creative Writing/San Francisco State Univ.; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013, etc.) combines short, reflective essays about literature with personal memories. The pieces (some previously published) are literary hybrids, and the book becomes a series of “unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.” The big names (Kafka, Chekhov, Melville, Cheever, Bellow, etc.) are well-represented, but so too are those outside of the canon—e.g., Lyonel Trouillot, Álvaro Mutis, Bohumil Hrabal and his “lightning strike of a novel,” Too Loud a Solitude. In the first piece, ostensibly about how Orner likes to read, reflect, look around, and just listen at San Francisco’s General Hospital’s cafeteria, the author transitions to Chekhov’s “tender and sorrowful” story “The Bishop,” which he admires for how the author (a doctor) lovingly employs details. He ends thinking about his dead grandmother. In a cabin in Bolinas, California, Orner thinks about his dead father and reads Breece D’J Pancake’s story “First Day of Winter,” which “gets [him] every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own.” Orner confesses that John Edgar Wideman’s story “Welcome” is the “saddest story” he has ever read “by a wide margin.” Again, thinking about his father, he asks, what is the best Father’s Day novel? “Hands down The Brothers Karamazov.” But Bernard Malamud’s “My Son the Murderer” is the best story. While it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages “to get to the bottom of fathers and sons,” Malamud “can name that tune in under 8.” At 22, he accidentally fell out of a canoe but saved the book he was reading—the indelible and “generous” To the Lighthouse—and then anxiously waited for it to dry in the sun so he could finish it. Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading.
Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a “decent library.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936787-25-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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