More descriptive than analytical, but a memorable portrait of a family fiercely loyal and loving to all but their...
A granddaughter mixes local lore and family history in the story of her mother’s family in Newfoundland, where sudden death is usual.
Newfoundland was an independent British colony until it joined Canada in 1949, a step not universally welcomed, for Newfoundlanders are a proud people, stoically enduring a harsh climate, dangerous work, and frequent poverty. Loyal to Britain, they suffered enormous casualties in WWI, but, as Downton notes, “dying in the war was noble. Dying at sea was not; it was expected, common, a way of life.” Like their fellow islanders, her own family experienced losses at sea and on land as uncles drowned, infant cousins died from diptheria, other relatives from tuberculosis—which also afflicted but didn’t kill her grandfather, though his children devoutly wished it had. Grandmother Ethel was a cultured, college-educated schoolteacher who married Sidney Wiseman, the youngest son of a wealthy fishing family. The family believed Ethel had really loved Sidney’s elder brother, Good, who was drowned at sea, and that she’d merely settled for Sidney, though Ethel insisted she loved him. Sidney was a monster, and the memoir—which moves back and forth in time as if the narrator were telling it to a family gathering, where long-forgotten memories often interrupt—suggests that he may have been mentally unstable. Whatever the cause, he treated his wife and six children with chilling cruelty: he locked a son in his room for an entire summer; deliberately, he once nearly drowned the writer’s mother; and on a stormy winter’s night he locked her outside in the snow. Ethel was frequently beaten, once so badly she had to have a kidney removed. Downton relates how the children adored their mother, who would never speak ill of their father, but escaped as soon as they could from a hellish father.
More descriptive than analytical, but a memorable portrait of a family fiercely loyal and loving to all but their unspeakable father.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55970-665-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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