Written at a fever pitch, this valuable memoir is not about whining as much as it is about surviving paternal insanity.
Surrealistically graphic memoir of a childhood dominated by a violently abusive father and timid mother.
Though childhood-abuse memoirs are abundant, Anderson’s is distinct in its minute descriptions of the intense physical and psychological torture he endured, which his helpless mother witnessed. Inspired by a letter he received from his mother asking about her and her husband’s parenting faults, Anderson lays out more than 60 specific incidents, most committed by his father. They range from somewhat insensitive (as a teen he was limited to watching only G-rated films) to shockingly violent. These disturbing accounts include house-wrecking wrestling matches, stealing money their son earned at his after-school jobs, threats to stop him from attending public school despite his superior grades, control of all his possessions except a comb, pen and an empty wallet, and rituals of sexual humiliation. One of six siblings in a family ruled by a tyrannical ex-military officer and his second wife, Anderson paints a harrowing portrait of the deleterious effects of dysfunctional parenting. He experienced brief respites when he was allowed to live for weeks with his older brother’s family and the family of his best friend. Both of these households offered to let him complete his adolescence in their loving homes, but Anderson was afraid to accept due to his fear of his father’s wrath. Written as one long accusation, there are tedious stretches where the reader can readily predict the father’s next outrage against his son. Yet Allen provides italicized patches of self-talk steeped in thick irony and sardonic comedy, with scenarios and stock phrases lifted from gangster films or spy thrillers.
Written at a fever pitch, this valuable memoir is not about whining as much as it is about surviving paternal insanity.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453785010
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
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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