The memoirs of an Armenian-American as she struggles for self- awareness. Avakian, whose mother and grandmother came to the US after surviving the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, grew up in New York and New Jersey in the 40's and 50's, lived as a professor's wife in the 60's, and entered the feminist movement—- recognizing her own identity as a lesbian—-in the 70's. Avakian's story begins with her struggle to ``become an American.'' All but denying her Armenian heritage, she attends a ``regular'' church, makes Jewish and Greek friends, and avoids her family's demands whenever possible. She studies art history at Alfred Univ. and then Columbia, marries a young academic and travels with him from one teaching appointment to another while raising their two young children. Avakian is at her best when describing her married years: The confusion and oppression she felt then are palpable. After becoming pregnant with her first child, she says, ``I spent most of the time sitting in the apartment and staring at the walls....I just sat and waited for the baby that had already changed my life.'' Her observations of university life and her accounts of friendships are also vivid and engrossing. But her chronicle bogs down with too-long descriptions of courses and university bickering. Avakian also does little to explore her Armenian heritage, and when she does return to the subject in the last chapter—by interviewing her relatives—the effort seems merely tacked on. Despite the Armenian-American twist, this is primarily the story of an academic wife breaking out of the mold to re-create herself. As such, it's well written and acutely observant, though slow in parts.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55861-051-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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