An expansive, uneven work that would benefit from a narrower focus.
Through the character of Karla, debut author Mayer chronicles her life, from a traumatic childhood in Austria through her retirement from successful psychiatry practice in the United States.
Part autobiography, part call to arms for childhood sex abuse victims and part exploration of Eastern healing, Mayer tells her story through the eyes of Karla, who, along the way, is sexually assaulted by multiple adult male perpetrators, with little support or empathy from the adults in her life. She’s briefly left behind with an aunt and uncle and then kidnapped, though somewhat willingly, by her mother. Her turbulent childhood continues through her mother’s remarriage, strained relationships with siblings, the challenges of immigration and the concealment of an explosive family secret. In adulthood, Karla settles into medicine, marriage and maternity while facing both personal and professional challenges. The fast-paced plot includes unplanned pregnancies greeted with joy or consternation, sudden deaths, protracted illnesses, abortions and marital strife. The variety of events heightens interest, but the somewhat stilted writing style can detract from reading pleasure (e.g., “Still, she had no doubt that all the craziness in her family influenced her interest in psychiatry, where these aberrations are studied in an educated manner”). Similarly, Mayer presents an unabashedly one-sided view that can come across as Pollyannaish: “As Karla thought about her mother as an innocent young girl, loyal to her family, not fearing work, and ambitious, she pictured her as being open to the world and not prepared for all the deceit in it. Her heart felt a thrill at what a wonderful young woman her mother had been.” Despite these shortcomings, though, the autobiographical portions of the book are likely to have broad appeal. Also, much of the Eastern philosophy will be interesting to readers regardless of their personal beliefs, although some of Mayer’s assertions (she claims to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan’s mother, and her husband is the reincarnation of Khan himself) will strain believability for many readers.
An expansive, uneven work that would benefit from a narrower focus.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463442897
Page Count: 262
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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