A captivating portrait of a bygone time.
A tender recollection of growing up on a farm in Ireland in the 1940s.
In precise, vibrant prose, novelist Phelan (Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told, 2015, etc.) creates a finely etched portrait of his parents and siblings, assorted friends and relations, the bully who made his school days a misery, and many eccentrics, clergymen, and neighbors who peopled his small world. On a 52-acre farm in County Laois, the Phelan family’s house was heated by the kitchen fireplace, hot-water bottles relieved the beds’ cold dampness for most of the year, and dry overcoats were piled on as extra blankets. Every Saturday evening, a black, cast-iron pot was hung above the fire, heating water in which every family member bathed. “As a child, I believed that my family was poor,” writes the author, because unlike some other children, he rarely had money for small pleasures. Whatever luxuries they had—a chemical toilet, gramophone, and Brownie Box camera, for example—were the rewards of tireless, demanding toil by his father, “with his all-devouring work ethic,” and his mother, “the sheltering harbor from the storms that sometimes raged in Dad’s head and spewed out in loud and angry words.” Frustration, fatigue, and worry fueled those storms. “I remember him as a man who loved his wife and his children,” Phelan reflects, “who at times was driven over the edge while trying desperately to take care of them.” Being a farmer was not in the author’s future; instead, it was assumed he was destined for the priesthood, a vocation he did not question. He absorbed Catholic theology and developed a requisite sense of guilt about breaking the Ten Commandments as well as a healthy skepticism about the “Irish mania” for missionary work: “the conversion of happy pagans into miserable Catholics.” He reveled in being an altar boy, besotted by the lovely Sister Carmel, who made learning responses for the Latin Mass “a time of warmth, love, and delight.” Ordained in 1965, he left the priesthood after a decade.
A captivating portrait of a bygone time.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9709-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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