Unlike other, neater narratives of being lost and found, Connors’ story—told with harrowing insight and fierce prose—is...
Connors (Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, 2012) reflects candidly on the years he spent unmoored after a family tragedy; he continuously found himself in places he felt apart from.
“A natty socialist at the Wall Street Journal. A white guy in a black neighborhood. Strange how comfortable my discomfort became,” writes the author, who, at the age of 23, after the shocking death of his brother, turned completely inward, “a man shrouded in almost total self-regard." As Connors struggled to find a place for his pain where it wouldn’t devour him, he stumbled into a career in journalism, even after he convinced himself he had given up on the business. “But the fact was I’d borrowed twenty-five grand to pay for an education in print journalism,” he writes, “so I had little choice but to pursue a career in print journalism.” At his desk in the Leisure & Arts section of the WSJ, surrounded by conservative editorial writers, Connors proudly displayed his left-wing politics by hanging posters of Emma Goldman and Ralph Nader. He had passionate, failed affairs and emotionally charged encounters with his neighbors as one of the only white faces in his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Connors' missing sense of purpose is keenly felt through passages that combine lyricism with dark humor to draw lines between grief and the uncanny. His search toward understanding his brother's death—which included studying graphic images from the autopsy report and reaching out to his brother’s ex-girlfriends—ultimately ends in a place of belonging. But the redemptive ending of this story, which Connors smartly does not dwell on, is far less compelling than the unique and brutally raw accounts of his search for connection.
Unlike other, neater narratives of being lost and found, Connors’ story—told with harrowing insight and fierce prose—is messy and incomplete and makes no apologies for being anything but.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0393088762
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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