Disjointed but dramatic and resonant.
Mandel's account of being her parents' "replacement child" following the death of an older sister she never knew.
On the morning of January 22, 1952, American Airlines flight 6780 crashed into the home in Elizabeth, N.J., where Mandel's parents resided with their two daughters. In addition to killing all 22 passengers and the captain, the accident left the family’s youngest child, 2-year-old Linda, terribly burned, while her 7-year-old sister, Donna, perished in the fire. Former corporate marketing director Mandel reflects on her parents' ensuing grief, guilt and their pervasive sense of loss that, years later, prompted them to have another child: the author. She grew up with constant reminders of the devastating crash, not the least of which were her sister's disfiguring injuries that required innumerable reconstructive surgeries. The narrative moves between time periods as Mandel conjures events on the day of the accident and in the years between the crash and her birth, vignettes from Mandel's childhood and her adult life (including three failed marriages), and imagined scenes between her parents. Describing her mother and father's decision to have another baby, she writes, "the prescription, then, for their own survival was a child conceived to heal the family." Mandel details her perception of her parents' motivation and her conflicted feelings, including resentment and gratitude, about the results of their choice. Most chapters are one to four pages, and the constant cutting between years feels choppy and distracting, but Mandel's story is compelling, and the emotional wreckage in her own life is crystal clear.
Disjointed but dramatic and resonant.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1580054768
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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