A moving and honest account by American Book Award-winning novelist Dew of what she learned when her oldest son came out. Dew (Fortunate Lives, 1992, etc.) perceptively describes how, after finding out that one son was gay, the straight members of her family overcame confusion and grief, eventually arriving at an understanding far beyond tolerance. Like much of the memoir, Dew's evocation of the ``elongated moment'' in which she learned that her son Steve was gay demonstrates her gift for describing the details of unease: ``Steve seemed lost in his own house.... His expression was precisely the curious gaze of assessment he had cast my way thirty minutes after he was born.'' The frankness with which she remembers her own awkwardness, even her most excruciating mistakes, is also admirable and goes far to mitigate the whiff of smug self- congratulation that sometimes creeps into the book. The Family Heart is at its best when Dew is relating her internal monologues. In characterizing her initial grief, for example, she singles out her assumption that Steve won't have children; her fear that if her children never become parents, they will never understand how much she loves them; and her worry that ``if either of my sons didn't have children, how would he ever be able to forgive my failures?'' Dew's use of place is less inspiring. In particular, though her ability to capture the details of her physical environment is masterful, she uses weather as a metaphor for emotion so often that it quickly becomes a predictable and tiresome device. Despite stylistic lapses and a few bursts of preachiness, a reflective exploration of a mother's struggle with her attitudes toward homosexuality and a family's negotiation of difference.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62450-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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