Neither the sentiment nor the passion is new. But Paretsky links different kinds of oppression in compelling ways.
A lacerating polemical memoir from the creator of V.I. Warshawski.
“Every writer’s difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech,” observes Paretsky, who looks here at five areas in which she’s struggled to wrest her individual voice from the command to be voiceless. She begins with her Kansas childhood, spent as the only sister among four brothers and a pair of needy, feuding parents who depended on her mothering and expressed no interest in what she thought or wrote. Next she recalls moving to Chicago at the time of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights ministry, noting that she’s always sided with underdogs because “I’m as needy as the most helpless.” She reviews the impact of Second Wave Feminism on her attempts to imagine women who were neither household angels nor rebellious monsters but simply human beings. She analyzes the dialectic of individualism and community in the hardboiled detective story, tracing Warshawski’s development from a Philip Marlowe in skirts to a heroine immersed in communal ties despite her own independence. And she concludes by surveying current threats to writers’ freedom to speak out, from the increasingly centralized power of market-driven publishers and chain stores to the repressive specter of the Patriot Act. Her own voice, untrammeled by the need of her Warshawski novels (Fire Sale, 2005, etc.) to provide detection, melodrama and shifts in mood, is ardent, angry and almost painfully direct. Readers will overlook occasional factual slips (talking about Raymond Chandler, Paretsky maintains that Carmen Sternwood never killed anyone and transfers the plot of Farewell, My Lovely to The Long Goodbye) in favor of her impassioned plea for the freedom to find one’s voice and her uncompromising indictment of the forces—familial, social, political—that would impose silence.
Neither the sentiment nor the passion is new. But Paretsky links different kinds of oppression in compelling ways.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84467-122-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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