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YOUR FATHER’S VOICE

LETTERS FOR EMMY ABOUT LIFE WITH JEREMY--AND WITHOUT HIM AFTER 9/11

An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary...

In another poignant addition to the literary legacy of 9/11, a young widow recalls for their infant daughter the father she will never know.

Alternating an account of her experiences after husband Jeremy died on Flight 93 with memories of their first meeting and subsequent relationship, Glick has produced an act of preservation as much as of mourning. Determined that their daughter Emmy, three months old when he died, should know her father, Glick recollects all the details she hopes will give a sense of Jeremy: his love of sport, especially judo, the way he’d sneak out of the house to see his friends, their roller-coaster relationship, and his success as a salesman. She recalls the day in 1984 when she first sat next to him in ninth-grade biology. She disliked Jeremy’s enormous Afro, which she thought made him look like a cannibal, but she enjoyed his sense of humor, and the two soon became friends. They sometimes dated, sometimes broke up for long periods of time, especially in college, but they always stayed in touch, either personally or through Jeremy’s many friends. They married in 1996 and three years later bought a lakeside home in New Jersey, where Glick, who had experienced a number of miscarriages, finally became pregnant with Emmy. As she records their past, she also describes the period following 9/11: her grief; the stress of dealing with the media; interviews with FBI; her several visits to the White House, where she met with President Bush. Therapy sessions joined her with other women who had lost loved ones that day, but nothing really prepared her for such harrowing experiences as receiving Jeremy’s few remains (teeth and a datebook) and listening to the tape from the Flight 93 black box.

An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary families.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-312-31921-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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