In an age when the number of readers is declining, a delightful book like this might just snare a few new recruits.
A self-help book about books.
Publishing executive Schwalbe had a bestseller with The End of Your Life Book Club (2012), a poignant memoir about growing up in a reading family and a two-person book club: the author and his ill mother. This follow-up employs a similar approach, with him discovering all kinds of books or poems “to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person.” His “manifesto for readers” is not about his favorite books but those that helped him when he had a need. Written in a chatty, conversational style, the book is thematically organized by a wide variety of needs: slowing down, searching, trusting, napping, praying, etc. One book’s shadow looms large: Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living—“there is no book I turn to more often.” It “lives up to the promise of its title.” When Schwalbe feels like quitting, he turns to “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the “patron saint of quitters.” He revisits David Copperfield, a “miracle of a book,” whenever he’s gone too long without remembering another David, a “beautiful, vibrant friend” who died. From Stuart Little, Schwalbe learns that, in the words of E.B. White, “questing is more important than finding.” Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train “gives us the tools we need to try to figure out whom we can trust,” while Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a “book about books changing lives, and it’s a book that has saved lives.” Schwalbe doesn’t go into that much detail about each book; rather, he leads by example, focusing on a book (Gift from the Sea, The Taste of Country Cooking, Zen in the Art of Archery) in the context of something specific and personal that happened to him.
In an age when the number of readers is declining, a delightful book like this might just snare a few new recruits.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35354-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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