A moving memoir about struggling to form personal relationships in turbulent environments.
A 40-something Oregon man writes about his yearslong experience with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program in this debut.
Douglas was living on a houseboat in a fairly posh part of metropolitan Portland in 2005 when he decided that he wanted to make a difference by helping at-risk youth. He’d seen a booth for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program at the Portland Pride Festival, was intrigued, and signed up. He was matched with Rico, a 12-year-old whose mother was an immigrant from Guatemala. At the time, the quiet, reserved Rico was living in foster care and had no objection to the match. Thus began the six-year-long story of their relationship, with early Frisbee games and movies evolving into Douglas playing a much greater role in Rico’s life, including attempting to steer him clear of gangs and drugs and to ensure that he graduated from high school. Although a Big Brother’s role is mainly to listen and be a friend, Douglas’ micromanaging approach was sometimes baffling to Rico, the author writes, as were his emotional demands. Douglas intersperses flashbacks to the 1970s throughout the Big Brother narrative and relates chilling tales of growing up gay in a strict, religious home. He also relates the story of Russell, his childhood friend and de facto bodyguard in school—a heroic figure who unfortunately descended into a life of crime. Douglas’ book does a beautiful job of connecting the past to the present, particularly in the sections that depict his blossoming relationship with his parents as they aged. His memories of being a gay teenager in the ’70s are also full of engaging personalities, sometimes monstrous and sometimes beautiful, which make the story hard to walk away from. As Rico grew up and Douglas’ involvement increased, the author broke a few Big Brother rules, particularly when he helped Rico out financially. Even so, Douglas’ compelling story moves toward a conclusion that’s a genuine testament to his tireless dedication to his Little Brother.
A moving memoir about struggling to form personal relationships in turbulent environments.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9970501-0-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Newsworthy Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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