At times (especially after the not-terribly-startling revelation of Ty’s affair with his adoring, married art student)...
A memoir of hard-won personal development and marital dissolution, set against the transformations of the baby-boomer era, by psychotherapist Pearlman (Keep the Home Fires Burning, not reviewed).
The author begins with ominous evocations of her upbringing in a precariously prosperous, urban Jewish household dominated by the figure of her father—a driven businessman, stern but devoted to his children, whom she gradually realized was a serial philanderer. When he died of heart failure at 46, Pearlman was confronted with the uneasy ambiguities presented by his longtime mistress’s grief, her mother’s evident equanimity, and the revelations of her beloved grandfather’s infidelity as well. Determined to break this familial pattern, and influenced by the early 1960s aura of social transformation, Pearlman fell in love with and married “Ty,” an African-American football player and artist who seemed to epitomize the turbulent dreams of the era. The author depicts her metamorphosis (from reserved, sheltered Jewish girl to politicized, sexually aware young woman) as part of the great urban and social transformations of the 1950s and ’60s. For two decades, Pearlman and Ty enjoyed a sexually charged, progressive marriage, where they both worked and shared child-raising responsibilities; she even published a book on long-term sexual monogamy. Yet this domestic idyll slowly declined as Ty succumbed to temptation. Eventually Pearlman and Ty separate, unable to reconcile separate desires, and the epilogue shows the author cultivating a new relationship.
At times (especially after the not-terribly-startling revelation of Ty’s affair with his adoring, married art student) Pearlman’s memoir becomes repetitive and predictable, but she has a sharp eye for detail and is adept at expanding her discussion of infidelity’s pain and relationship-mutating qualities—pinpointing its effects on children, adult acquaintances, and even (in the case of her parents and grandparents) one’s history.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-9673701-2-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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