A bleak history recounted with justifiably burning indignation, dampened by limp, soggy prose.
Life with a mentally ill mother was bad, but group homes and foster care were loveless and deadening.
Now a lawyer advocating for children’s rights, Bridge begins his memoir in Alabama, where he was participating in a lawsuit against the Eufaula Adolescent Center. An encounter with one of the center’s brutalized, hopeless charges prompts memories of his own experiences of neglect and abuse. His mother tried her best, she later pathetically told him. An attractive, intelligent woman, she made a bad marriage, couldn’t hold even the most menial jobs, dabbled in crime and after she lost her son was in and out of various institutions, penal and psychiatric. The author still visits her at the Metropolitan State Hospital—not so frequently as he should, he confesses. Although he retains a deep affection for the eponymous Hope (her middle name), his childhood with her was miserable. He witnessed her rape. He was knocked around when he wouldn’t change the television channel for a man temporarily living with them. Mom took him along on a botched burglary gig. Los Angeles County eventually removed the boy to the not-very-nurturing foster care of the Leonards, who did little to encourage him, much to dispirit him. Nevertheless, Bridge emerged from this messy maze with a social conscience, a Fulbright Scholarship and degrees from Wesleyan University and Harvard Law School. The author doesn’t fully explain how he transformed himself into a scholar, let alone a student popular enough to win a major school election. He mentions a few teachers who helped, a few books he read (Salinger’s were favorites), but we get no real notion of what enabled his intellectual growth. In the closing pages, Bridge returns to Eufaula, making the grim point that protection for children in foster or state care has not improved since his own unhappy youth.
A bleak history recounted with justifiably burning indignation, dampened by limp, soggy prose.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0322-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
