Adds little new or memorable material to an old story.
A New York Times executive chronicles her dysfunctional relationship with her mother.
The death of her beloved, somewhat feckless father when she was 11 brought an end to her parents’ shouting matches, but without him as a buffer, the animosity increased between smart, self-sufficient Myers and her short-tempered, resentful, chain-smoking mother. School and reading were the girl’s escapes from a miserable home life marked by physical violence and abusive language. In lackluster prose comprised of flat, declarative sentences, the author describes fighting constantly with her mother as a teenager. They both saw Myers as her father’s daughter, someone who did not want to grow up to be “a switchboard operator in a bra factory,” as her unambitious mother was. Thrown out of the house more than once, the author moved out for good at 18. “I was able to admit what I knew all along,” she writes. “I hated her and didn’t care if she hated me back.” Later, after Myers married, their relationship became mildly civil. When the author had a baby, she realized that her mother possessed a softer, maternal side that she had not seen before. However, her mother’s early death from lung cancer prevented the development of a closer bond. Myers’s relationship with her two younger siblings was always cool and distant, and when the three of them were sorting through their mother’s possessions, she deliberately concealed a box of old letters and photos, which she took away. Years later, when her daughter was a teenager, Myers opened the box for the first time; the discovery of its contents and significance closes the book on a contrived note.
Adds little new or memorable material to an old story.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4305-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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