The literary sensibility speaks more broadly to the human condition, as the author relates the particularities of his own...
Sweet and sad but generally tender vignettes about a poet/professor’s coming-of-age as a gay Mexican immigrant.
González (English/Rutgers-Newark; Mariposa Gown, 2012, etc.) revisits some of the same territory as his American Book Award–winning Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006), though this is not a flowing narrative but more like a scrapbook of short pieces, both prose and poetry, few of them longer than a page. As the title suggests, “hunger” provides the thematic thread, not only for food (his family was poor) and later for sex, but also for identity, connection and acceptance. “I was afraid of my hungry gay body,” he writes, though he didn’t realize his sexual orientation until his experiences with an early girlfriend made it obvious to her and to him. His father had mocked him because he was fat, gentle and nonathletic. A Christmas photo spurs memories of his impoverished upbringing that remind him of many others: “At the time of the photograph, I didn’t notice the tree going hungry in the back, its plastic branches spaced apart like bones on a ribcage. The tinsel drooping like strings of saliva. An anemic rosary of Christmas lights. My brother and I knelt in front of the tree, our striped shirts compensating for the dearth of gifts beneath it.” Later, he writes with writerly self-importance of his life as an author: “ ‘What do you write about?’ he asked, and I answered, quite simplistically, ‘Life,’ offering the man I was going to sleep with that night a bouquet of yellow flowers instead of thorns had I admitted, more truthfully, ‘Death’ or ‘Violence’ or ‘Pain,’ as in the horrors that writers will inflict on people who ask for them.”
The literary sensibility speaks more broadly to the human condition, as the author relates the particularities of his own experience through shards of memory.Pub Date: May 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29250-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
