An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.
Barbed yet charming memoir by the noted literary critic (The Truth About the Irish, 2000, etc.).
Growing up poor and Catholic in the rundown English city of Salford, he writes, “though you were a minority yourself, you were not brought up to prize the crankish or lovably idiosyncratic . . . or clamorously approve of him who stands alone.” Yet Eagleton maintained such an iconoclastic, inquisitive stance throughout his experiences with religious education, a stiflingly bad primary school, haughty Oxford, and ingrown leftist politics. His memoir is intriguingly organized into seven sections naming the intellectual and spiritual influences he encountered on his journey: “Lifers,” “Catholics,” “Thinkers,” “Politicos,” “Losers,” “Dons,” and “Aristos.” The “Lifers” were Carmelite nuns; ten-year-old Eagleton was their convent’s gatekeeper, the only lay male they encountered. This provided grounding for his skeptical adolescence, when he spent time in a grim seminary whose eccentric goings-on turned him toward more worldly pursuits. In “Thinkers,” he is unsentimental about his education: “I was a puny, livid-faced Oliver Twist among scabby-kneed roughs [who had] the sense of honor and blood-obligation of a Palermo pimp, and a range of experience as limited and repetitive as a fruitbat’s.” Despite this society’s animosity toward literary matters, Eagleton propelled himself into the scholarly life aided by Salford’s little-recognized cultural heritage and his own compulsive writing habits. His early academic successes allowed him to infiltrate the precincts of the moneyed and tenured classes, as well as the equally calcified Marxist left of the 1960s and ’70s; individuals in both groups receive humorous drubbings. Eagleton writes deftly, merging discussion of his simple beginnings and the passions that spurred him on through strife with genuine wit and a predilection for absurdist simile. Throughout, he remains attuned to prickly issues of class and achievement, laying bare the stratifications he witnessed in Anglo-Irish society.
An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29122-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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 2024 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.
