A straightforward, full documentation of the challenges encountered in providing care to society’s most neglected children.
Diaristic account of providing foster care to a woefully abused child.
Glass, a prolific author of books on her experiences as a foster parent (A Baby’s Cry, 2012, etc.), was initially reluctant to provide a foster home for a girl as severely abused as Aimee, who was “on the child protection register at birth.” Although the author had experience with traumatized children who acted out toward the social workers and foster parents who stepped in, even she was shocked by Aimee’s physical condition and behavior: ill-clothed, lice-ridden, addicted to sweets, rude and possessed of a sexual knowledge indicative of abuse. As Aimee began to adjust to the foster-care experience, Glass found the process more difficult due to the disturbances caused by Aimee’s mother, Susan, a wretched drug addict who had clearly left Aimee vulnerable to unsavory men. Susan threatened Aimee and made up dramatic stories for the various social workers attempting to manage the case, though she also eventually gave a partial admission of her faults: “You know how to look after kids. I never did. I’m not a bad person, I just can’t look after kids properly.” Although Aimee’s story has a happy ending, Glass ends with a reminder that Aimee is “one of millions of children worldwide who are not rescued when their parents fail.” The author writes in a straightforward and journalistic rather than melodramatic fashion, which makes the grisly back story of the misdeeds committed against Aimee easier to bear. However, she chooses not to employ editorial compression, so readers witness what seems to be the complete daily progress of Glass’ relationship with Aimee and her many drama-filled encounters with Susan. It is a monotonous approach to disturbing material.
A straightforward, full documentation of the challenges encountered in providing care to society’s most neglected children.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-00-748677-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Element
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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