The heart-rending effects of change laid bare.
An insightful memoir that traces a teenage girl’s adjustment to her father’s sudden death.
Collins was a teenager growing up in Central Pennsylvania when her “safe and secure” world irrevocably changed. As she recalls in her moving, sharply observed memoir, she had just come home from school when she learned her father had died of a heart attack at the age of 47. “Life without my dad was unimaginable,” she says. Collins recalls how her life evolved after the tragedy, changes made even more difficult by the loss of the family home, a controlling uncle—“suspicion and loathing for him clung to me like moss to tree bark”—and a remote, anguished mother. As a child, Collins obviously wasn’t able to approach her mother’s condition from a clinical perspective; she merely saw a woman with whom she’d desperately like to connect but, in another of the book’s many compelling metaphors, who “resisted speaking of things that bothered her like a clam resisted being opened by a starfish.” In only the first year after her father’s death, she writes, “there had been so many changes….Things I couldn’t foresee; things I couldn’t control.” Finally, one “dark night of winter,” she found her mother sitting silent and alone in their modest apartment, her “crystal blue eyes” having turned “strangely dark—like two black disks void of focus or feeling.” Her mother had packed a suitcase to go to California. “Terror mainlined in my veins,” Collins remembers. Her mother had electroshock treatments in a psychiatric ward, where a nurse unraveled the mystery, telling Collins that she was in a deep depression. The later part of the book, in which Collins describes her college years and a relationship with a student who became her first husband, is less gripping. But as a whole, the memoir is an effective exploration of change and how to come to terms with it. Through all the losses, Collins says, she was “beginning to begin a long process of discernment about how I wanted to handle my life, wherever the river of time would carry me.”
The heart-rending effects of change laid bare.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1452556390
Page Count: 280
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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