An absorbing story, still fresh from the pain of adoption and loss.
A woman’s ardent odyssey to retrace her path from foster care to adoption, reconstructed through court documents and annotated with honest musings on how and why her family fell apart.
Though adopted at age 5, Ohrstrom begins her debut memoir in adolescence, when her twin brother pulled from the fog of their dysfunctional childhood the siblings’ birth surname. This single clue set off the author’s journey to find their birth parents: The story takes the tone of a detailed diary, with the same events rehashed at several points. Ohrstrom struggled to uncover information about her birth family and to understand the distance she felt from her siblings, who didn’t share the same desire to learn about their past. The narrator cycled through angst, betrayal and eventual acceptance. Unfortunately, significant events are left unexamined, in particular the decision to run away from her adoptive family. Given the great lengths Ohrstrom goes to explain the arc of her family’s saga before her birth and during her childhood, there are wide gaps in her own history. The sections lump together therapylike entries and official letters written to various government agencies with document requests. The narrator makes some attempt to use these documents as guideposts, tethering to reality her stream-of-consciousness responses, especially the reactions to her mother’s hospital records from her various stays at mental institutions during the 1950s and ’60s. But at times, the re-creations of Ohrstrom’s discovery process read like scenes from a television crime drama, revelatory in a flamboyant way, with projections about her parents’ personalities and motives serving as a way to explain what happened to her.
An absorbing story, still fresh from the pain of adoption and loss.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491713075
Page Count: 178
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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