A memoir whose heart pays considerable homage to its subjects.
Humor and tragedy blend seamlessly in this memoir of childhood upbringing and family trauma.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors and one of seven sisters, Pressman recounts her youth in Skokie, Ill., and how it intermingles with her family history. Throughout her young life, she often derides her parents’ obsession with their harrowing past, at one point scoffing that “Holocaust Judaism” has become their surrogate religion in place of more established movements of American Judaism. But as much as she tries to mold the haunting tales of her parents to her “happy ending template,” or even ignore them altogether, these stories—and the lessons they tell—play a crucial role in her formative years. Interweaving various events across time, the memoir juxtaposes Pressman’s angst at her ancestry’s ineluctable grip with the pre-adolescent and teenage tribulations she experiences in her comfortable suburban milieu. These strands occasionally diverge too widely, causing some family anecdotes to feel arbitrary as much as they prove entertaining. Still, the poignancy of Pressman’s voice and her meticulous attention to detail instill life into the characters and settings that surround her, as well as the ghosts of horrors past. This work separates itself from the ever-expanding memoir pool by emphasizing the universal aspects of deeply personal issues. Anyone with siblings can relate to the author’s amusing descriptions of the complicated power dynamics among her sisters. Even if one has never met a Holocaust survivor, he or she can empathize with Pressman’s attempts to grasp the weight of her parents’ struggle to survive. The memoir doesn’t unequivocally justify the actions or beliefs of any one character, but its overriding sense of pathos honors each person’s way of dealing with triumph and defeat. Since it deals with issues of existence, this quality has never been more necessary.
A memoir whose heart pays considerable homage to its subjects.Pub Date: April 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456470685
Page Count: 339
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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