A heartbreaking tribute to a couple’s true love.
A devoted widower relates his life with his beloved of 41 years in this memoir.
As a young Indian man coming of age in 1970s South Africa, all Luckan (Love Is All There Is, 2015) wanted to do was play music, until one day, while walking home from college, he spotted two young girls struggling to carry a box up the road to their house. His eyes met those of the eldest, he writes, and he felt a rush of emotion. However, when he later ran into her at a local shop, it took some convincing for her to tell him her name. It was Mamata, but she said that she preferred to be called “Baby.” The two soon became inseparable and remained so for decades. Their road to happiness, though, was rocky; Baby, he writes, came from an impoverished, abusive background, and Luckan’s parents disapproved of their son dating a girl from a different caste. The two married when Baby was only 16; both were certain that nothing could break their bond, and they were determined to show their families that they were committed. They ended up living in their car and struggled for a long time; Baby experienced multiple miscarriages and a stillborn birth before the couple finally had a roof over their heads. As time passed, they eventually found relief from poverty and soon had two healthy children, which helped heal the wounds they’d suffered. But hardships kept coming, and the couple became suicidal, with only their promises to each other pulling them back from the precipice. The author goes on to tell of how their dedication propelled them forward, and how many joyous years passed before the two faced their final battle against the world together. Throughout this book, Luckan seizes every opportunity to espouse his love for Baby, whom he calls his “lotus.” Although the book is often sentimental, it effectively shows that the tragedies that the couple endured provided them with the fervent emotion they needed to keep going. When the author relates stories of hard times, his passion rings fierce and true, and his pain is devastating to behold. By the final pages, readers will feel the full weight of a hard but love-filled life.
A heartbreaking tribute to a couple’s true love.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-0860-5
Page Count: 206
Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
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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