An unusually structured and gravely confessional memoir.
Alvarado (Not a Matter of Love, 2006) follows her debut short-story collection with a memoir that also explores the intersection of Hispanic and Anglo cultures in the western United States. This highly personal work weaves together stories of her parents' lives as well as her own experiences with love, familial attachment, heroin addiction, motherhood, travel and her writing. "I have autobiography anxiety," she writes, explaining that she felt "no tenderness" for the self recorded in her adolescent journal. This may explain, to some degree, the wild deviation Alvarado takes from typical autobiographies. With no quotation marks and chapters averaging one page, she writes only in the present tense, from her perspective as a girl up to now, in her mid-50s. This somewhat jarring structure imbues the book with a strong, immediate voice, and it's easy to imagine it read aloud as something akin to spoken-word poetry. Her overlapping of the past and present illuminates her legacy and the connections between herself and, respectively, her mother and daughter. In examining her own secrets, she recognizes that, even if she doesn't know what they are, her children also have secrets. She wonders if they tried to confide in her and she failed. "Maybe," she writes, "like my mother, I shut my eyes, my ears, my heart." But her memoir stands as a striking rebuttal to that fear. She lays bare in these pages the many stories and details of her life and identity. Devoid of self-pity or nostalgia, Alvarado's voice is bell-clear. Some readers may find the lack of humor and the scattered structure unappealing, but for others this collection of tales will resonate. Fragmented but poetic.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60938-037-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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 2026 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.
