A sobering and revelatory account of a family tragedy unfolding over many years.
A mother recounts her struggle to maintain her belief in God in the face of her daughter’s life sentence in this inspirational memoir.
Debut author Hirst thought she was doing everything right. A devout Christian from a young age, she married her high school sweetheart, moved to a small Washington town to raise a family, and eventually opened two restaurants with her husband, Ron. God appeared to smile on her and her family. Then her 35-year-old daughter, Lacey, was sentenced to life without parole for hiring someone to kill her husband’s pregnant girlfriend. “Courtroom activity fades into the background as I query myself: Did I not pray correctly?” remembers the author. “Did I not believe enough in His power? Why has God forsaken my family and me?” Leading up to the trial, Hirst had been certain of her daughter’s innocence and eventual acquittal despite the widespread assumption that Lacey was guilty. Afterward, the author wasn’t sure of anything. This book is an account of how Hirst learned to be a mother to a woman permanently imprisoned, stepping in to raise Lacey’s children and supporting her daughter from the outside. It is also the story of a woman forced to restart her relationship with God from scratch. Hirst’s prose is quietly emotional and often powerful, as here when she describes her anxiety during Lacey’s long trial: “The unknown hung over me like a tornado funnel in the distance. I didn’t know where or how violently it might touch down. I cleaned closets, junk drawers, and file cabinets. By organizing unseen chaos, I attempted to regain order in my life.” The case itself—and the author’s relationship to it—is deeply engrossing while the book’s religious element is actually quite light. Hirst’s nightmare situation will be sympathetic to any reader. It is truly her quagmire—not Lacey’s—in which the audience will become ensnared. By the end, the author manages to get to a place that feels somehow redemptive, leaving readers to wonder whether they would be able to make it there as well.
A sobering and revelatory account of a family tragedy unfolding over many years.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-594-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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