A poignant study of gratitude for the simple life.
Fraser (The Territory of Men, 2002) soulfully evokes the year she spent in an isolated forest retreat recovering from the trauma of divorce and exploring the inner landscape of her heart.
When the author divorced her husband, the emotional fallout left her devastated. Not only was she unprepared for how joint custody would redefine her relationship to her young son Dylan, but she was also unprepared for the wave of "crippling guilt of being the one who left.” To maintain her privacy in the conservative California mountain town where they lived and ensure Dylan had access to his father, Fraser quietly moved into a tiny, one-bedroom house on the edge of a nearby forest. In this lonely but beautiful setting, Fraser began to examine her life. She thought about her Swedish great-grandmother, who was forced to leave her six children behind and follow a fugitive husband to America, where the two divorced. She eventually reunited with some of her children, but for the rest of her life, she worked "like a slave" in a land far from home. From this extraordinary woman, Fraser came to understand that survival meant "setting a course" for herself and making peace with her choices. She accepted the financial challenges of being a single parent with a low-paying job and found renewed joy in the companionship of her dog and cats. As she learned to appreciate the natural world around her, Fraser came to value both her freedom and the pain that had come along with it. Her injuries, like those done to the great scarred trees around her, were actually a testament to the hidden beauty of life itself—and to the choice to either live in fear or "look for [the] gifts" in every experience, no matter how painful.
A poignant study of gratitude for the simple life.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-113-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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