Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.
A peripatetic childhood is marked by resentment and loneliness.
Because her father worked for a petroleum company, Wallen (Moon Pies and Movie Stars, 2006) moved with her family from Nevada to Nigeria, Peru, and Bolivia, each time suffering “giant, seismic shifts in cultures” that led to a fear of emotional attachments and inevitable loss. In her first nonfiction book, the author creates a candid but uneven rendering of her childhood experiences, probing family stories in an effort to discover reality. One experience, which mystifies Wallen, occurred in Peru, where she remembers that her family looted an ancient gravesite for artifacts, with which they decorated their home. Asking her parents, now in their 80s, for verification, her mother admits that they had been grave robbers but insists that she “had no idea” that what they were doing was illegal, if not immoral. “We were ghouls,” Wallen’s mother realizes now. “Hideous people.” But apart from that event, the family hardly seems ghoulish or hideous, although they were sometimes clueless about young Amy’s needs. Unfortunately, family members and friends come across as one-dimensional figures or, worse, stereotypes—e.g., the buxom, warmhearted African nanny, the diffident house steward. Wallen’s two older siblings, sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and her father, usually out in the field, are lightly sketched. Her mother, “nervous and harried,” emerges as brittle, impatient, and highly demanding. Wallen’s longing for her love is a recurring theme. “I had a talent for disappointing her,” she writes. The author sees unearthing a dead body as analogous to the perilous project of digging up shards of the past. “Every time you remember,” she writes, “you rewrite” and reimagine. “The more often you tell the memory, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened.” But her self-portrait undermines her project of discovering family history: as she tries to capture her childish perspective, she too often comes across as whiny rather than emotionally vulnerable.
Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9695-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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