The only weakness with this book is the length. Please, sir, may we have some more?
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author takes a break from fiction.
After three decades and a dozen works of fiction, Russo (Trajectory, 2017, etc.) offers up this splendid collection of essays. Some were previously published, and one was spoken: a charming commencement speech highlighting “Russo’s Rules for a Good Life.” These are wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy. These admirable qualities are most prevalent in “Imagining Jenny,” published as an afterword to Jennifer Finney Boylan’s popular 2003 memoir, She’s Not There, about her sex reassignment surgery. Jim Boylan was Russo’s close friend and a fellow college professor at Colby. At first, writes the author, “I missed my old pal Jim and wanted him…back again.” But he came to understand and appreciate what his friend was going through, and he creates a tender, affectionate, “great love story.” The rest of the essays focus on writers. Russo expertly resuscitates Dickens’ Pickwick Papers for new readers as he explores "the spectacle of genius recognizing itself.” He’s also insightful about Twain’s nonfiction, which offered up new opportunities for the “inspired, indeed unparalleled, bullshitter” who later became the “compassionate, broad-minded and fatherly” author of Huckleberry Finn. Along the way, we learn about some of Russo’s other favorite writers, including Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor, and musicians: Springsteen, Dylan, Grace Slick. The longest piece, “Getting Good,” is a pep talk about the road the author took to become a successful writer, while the title essay argues for writers going home again in order to find the right tone for their writing. “The Gravestone and the Commode” is a riff on the importance of humor in life and literature: “The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering.”
The only weakness with this book is the length. Please, sir, may we have some more?Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3351-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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