A mediocre, clichÇ-riddled tale of America’s first black naval aviator, by the author of To Kill the Leopard (1993) and numerous other works. Taylor starts his tale with the moment when Brown was shot down behind enemy lines at the onset of the Korean war. From there he jumps back to Brown’s childhood in a dirt-poor Mississippi farm town, then forward again to Brown’s college career and military training. Taylor has a potentially powerful story of one man’s striving against both institutional and individual racism in the American military, but his disjointed back-and-forth narrative is made worse by the fact that the author continually reads into Brown’s emotions to describe what his feelings were, say, regarding racial slurs and slights, while providing little basis for his analysis. Further, while Taylor finds his stride in describing the military side of his subject’s life—particularly his initial attempt at learning to fly and his battle exploits—the account of his civilian life falls flat. Brown’s own letters, to his wife and parents and former teachers, interspersed throughout the book, are far livelier than Taylor’s writing; for instance, he describes training and his fear of failure. Finally, Taylor relies on the most stereotypical descriptions possible; in writing of Brown’s first experiences among airplanes, a dirt runway was, he writes, “his path to the sky.” While Brown’s story is an important one, Taylor imbues it with the charm and cadences of a volume for young adults—hardly a fitting tribute to Brown, who was a subject of one of President Reagan’s inspirational stories of the American dream. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97689-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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