An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.
A journalist’s account of how and why she took a chance on a new life and home-rehabilitation project in the down-and-out city of Detroit.
When former Fortune Small Business senior editor Haimerl and her husband, Karl, decided to leave their increasingly unaffordable Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, it was with the idea of going somewhere that, unlike such trendy cities as Portland or Seattle, “was forging its future.” The couple eventually chose Detroit, which appealed because of its “powerful lure of its cheap real estate.” They made their first move away from New York after Haimerl received a prestigious journalism fellowship from the University of Michigan. When a post-graduation job offer at a Detroit newspaper came through, she and her husband took their entire savings and bought an abandoned 1914 Georgian Revival in a revivifying neighborhood. Though listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house, which the couple bought for just $35,000, was a “3,000-square-foot box of fuckedupedness” that had no electricity, running water, or heat. Friends and longtime Detroit residents urged them to walk away from their investment, but they refused. Armed with an initial remodeling budget of $100,000, they befriended a genially quirky contractor and committed Detroiter who told them that the house would need more than three times that amount to simply become livable. Risking their financial futures on real estate in a city struggling to find its way out of bankruptcy, the pair cast their lot with others like themselves who took Detroit for what it was and didn’t attempt to “make it over into what they left.” Haimerl does not ignore how her place in the middle class made homeownership possible for her, nor does she forget the problematic nature of Detroit's recovery. At the same time, she also concludes that the “key to the city's future” is investment by people and banks willing to believe in Detroit's value as a place to call home.
An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7624-5735-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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