Intimate, funny and keenly observed.
A British memoirist continues the engaging story she began in her best-selling book, Diplomatic Baggage (2005), about her late-midlife experiences as the wife of a career diplomat.
When the peripatetic Keenan and her husband, AW, returned to Europe from Kazakhstan, each felt like “a lost sock in the laundromat of life.” As AW trekked back and forth between his post in Brussels and the couple’s home in London awaiting word on what would be his next, and final, assignment abroad, the author learned that she had breast cancer. Meanwhile, their two grown daughters were entering new phases in their lives as wives and mothers. Between her surgery, planning for one daughter’s wedding and awaiting the arrival of another’s baby, Keenan felt like “a maypole with [her] ribbons being tugged by [her] family in all directions.” But she survived the changes and learned to cherish the grandchildren who had first seemed like “interruptions to normal life.” Her husband’s new posting to Azerbaijan—a beautiful but ruined country where “the word for ‘corruption’ and ‘gratitude’ [were] the same”—brought new challenges. There, she coped with the occasional pangs of jealousy over AW’s gorgeous young assistants and frequent but amused frustrations with a Russian housekeeper who seemed determined to drive Keenan mad with her bizarre antics. A holiday at a Sri Lankan spa intended to restore peace and health turned into an unintended ordeal that left the author even more frazzled than when she started. Even retirement seemed an adventure—until she began to realize the implications it had for her and her husband’s identities and daily routines. It was then that she realized her life hadn’t been so much about seeing the world as about the inner journeys those travels had set her upon.
Intimate, funny and keenly observed.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4088-4690-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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