From the popular octogenarian columnist and inspirational author (The Messiah, 1987, etc.): a moving and refreshingly candid account of her second marriage. Announcing that ``this book is about the most exciting adventure of [my] life,'' Holmes tells how, in her early 70s, she met and married ``an incredible man'' with whom, for the first time in her life, she could share ``almost everything [I] thought and felt.'' Married for nearly 50 years to a devoted husband with whom, however, she had little in common, Holmes found widowhood a lonely business. But on New Year's Eve 1980, she received a surprise call from a stranger, one George Schmieler, who was to change her life. George, devastated by the recent death of his own spouse, Caroyln, had called because he'd been moved by reading a copy of Holmes's 1969 bestseller, I've Got to Talk to Somebody, God, which he'd found among his wife's possessions. Meetings and a proposal of marriage followed, and Holmes realized that, in George, she'd found the great love of her life. The couple married in 1981 and went on to enjoy a decade of togetherness until George's death—a decade that ``has been the happiest, most romantic, inspiring, and beautiful of all.'' But what gives Holmes's story a dimension beyond the record of true love and life with a remarkable man is the honesty with which she also records the darker side of a second marriage: the jealousy she felt for the years George had shared with his first wife; the awkwardness of moving into another woman's home; and the winning over of George's children—who, though adults, had nonetheless lost a beloved mother. A treat for Holmes fans and, for those less taken with the inspirational subtext, a realistic yet upbeat account of love and marriage in the sunset years.
Pub Date: April 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-41293-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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