A touching joint memoir by a birth mother and her adopted daughter about their lives apart and the close bond they shared until Crumpacker's recent death.
Copywriter Picariello writes about how she succeeded in tracking down her birth mother in 1996 after a two-year search. As early as she can remember, she knew she had been “chosen” by her adoptive parents, and she was told how her birth parents had married during the Korean War after knowing each other for only one month and separated shortly thereafter. Her birth mother couldn't manage alone and did what seemed best for the baby by finding her loving adoptive parents. Raised by a controlling mother, she was socially maladjusted—as a child she was a bookish loner, and as a teenager she experimented with drugs and sexual liberation. Married at 19 to a lawyer 10 years her senior, her life became more stable, although initially she felt overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood. Crumpacker (How to Slice an Onion: Cooking Basics and Beyond, 2009) describes her family background, in many ways similar to that of her daughter. Both of their mothers displaced their own insecurities onto their daughters. Crumpacker writes that her mother found her “different—and difficult. She felt it was her responsibility to mold me.” Her failed marriage, also at the age of 19, was an attempt to establish her independence from her mother. The circumstances of her marriage were more complicated than the story that Picariello was told, but essentially similar. She, too, had attempted to find her daughter—unsuccessfully. When they finally met, they found a startling affinity and were drawn to each other immediately. An absorbing story about adoption and much more.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4027-7570-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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