By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love and imagination.
A Mexican-American novelist’s wickedly compelling account of a dysfunctional childhood growing up “a full blooded American Indian brave” with five different fathers.
Skyhorse’s (The Madonnas of Echo Park, 2010) Mexican-born father left the family when the author was 3. Beautiful but prone to exaggeration, his mother, Maria, promptly renamed herself Running Deer and told her son that his father was an incarcerated Native American activist named Paul Skyhorse. While corresponding with her convict lover, the tempestuous Maria began bringing home a series of replacement fathers for her son who became “magicians, able to appear or disappear at will.” When the men finally left for good, each contributed to the hole in Skyhorse’s life that only “got bigger as [he] got older” and made him question his own ability to ever be a father himself. The stable but witheringly sharp-tongued center of the family home was Maria’s mother, June. While her daughter ran her own phone sex business and created the myths that substituted for Skyhorse’s true family history, June, a lesbian, “collect[ed] neighborhood stories and barter[ed] them” with everyone she knew. Guilt and anger kept the author emotionally tied to his mother even after he left home and Maria eventually died. He learned to accept himself as a Mexican “who happened to be raised as [his] mother’s kind of Indian,” but he struggled through broken relationships and bouts of depression. As he gathered up the shards of his life and began to make peace with all of his fathers, especially his biological one, Skyhorse realized the one truth that his storytelling mother and grandmother had known instinctively: that “stories [could] help you survive…and transform your life…from where you are into wherever you want to be.”
By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love and imagination.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7087-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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