A young Englishwoman’s tactile memoir of growing up amid economic hardship and violent dysfunction. Ashworth’s Maltese father drowned in the 1970s when the author was five years old. On the playground, as a dark-skinned girl with her father’s Mediterranean blood, Ashworth (currently a fellow at Oxford) was called a foreigner, a “Bloody Paki.” This self-portrait is stylistically fresh, written in short, cinematic bursts of memory, its strengths in its physical detail: images of her mother stewing her little sister’s dirty nappies in the kitchen, her evening-arriving stepfather’s key rattle and boot brush and scrape on the front doormat. But the story of abuse she tells is an ancient one. Even when the author was a child, through the family’s move to Canada and then, later, back to England and eventually Manchester, her mother was wearing sunglasses to hide the bruises Ashworth’s stepfather gave her. While Ashworth’s mother was conflicted over her tormentor, her daughter wondered why she continued to see the man and to live her life for him. Ashworth’s tame descriptions of adolescent rituals that include experimenting with boys seem mundane compared to her volcanic home life, where her stepfather is always ready to go off and throttle her or her mother. He eventually leaves and is replaced in her mother’s affections by Terry, or “Tez,” a small-time criminal who brings in lots of money until he’s hauled off to prison. Returned, he too displays a pugilistic streak, until eventually her mother is hospitalized by her injuries and they separate as the author prepares for her liberating “flight” to Oxford and a university education. At one point Ashworth, who excels in school and learns to appreciate Austen, Hardy, Larkin, and Plath, imagines how she might use the words she reads to defend herself from Tez, how she might carry a “beautiful sting.” Her literary debut carries both—the beauty and the sting.
Pub Date: May 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5762-5
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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