A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane.
A historical and nostalgic look at the family road trip.
In his first book, a mix of memoir, history lesson, and travelogue, advertising copywriter Ratay waxes wistfully over the rise and fall of the tradition of traversing the United States via the nation’s superhighways. Using as a jumping-off point his personal experiences in the 1970s as a child stuffed into the back of a station wagon with his siblings (“although ordinary Joes couldn’t afford a plane ticket, nearly every family could afford a car, often two”), the author covers a wide variety of topics related to family road trips. He discusses the construction of U.S. interstates, the need for dining establishments, gas stations, and motels for the families on the road, and the sights a child might have longed to see, including a whole slew of “World’s Largest” objects or animals. Ratay includes details about the rise of theme parks, including Disneyland and Disneyworld, Knott’s Berry Farm, and others, when more safety features, including seat belts, were introduced, and how the use of CB radios kept people in touch with one another on the road. He also shares his thoughts on how cheaper air fare and the need for faster travel have helped make the long road trip somewhat of a relic. Some of the more minute details—e.g., about the roof design on Stuckey’s restaurants and their distinctive yellow-and-red billboards—may not appeal to a wide audience, but much of the narrative will find favor with older readers who can readily recall their own experiences riding in the car while Dad drove and Mom navigated. By sharing this history, Ratay also provides a useful juxtaposition against the modern vacation, with each person engaged with an electronic device rather than each other and the surroundings outside the windows.
A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8874-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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