An enjoyable, moving read about the pleasure of being just a little bit different.
A memoir about a free-spirited young woman who, together with her quirky family, prepares for her grandmother’s death.
Debut author Neal tells the story of her large, unique and oft-reconstituted family that suffered through “three generations of failed marriages.” Shortly after the book begins, Buffi is called to the bedside of her grandmother Mopsie, a woman considered by her offspring to be both an uber-matriarch and dark mystery. Buffi’s unnamed mother assures her that unlike the many other near-death moments Mopsie has endured during her time in hospice, this time, Mopsie is really dying. But she’s not: After an overnight scare, Mopsie miraculously recovers yet again. The closer-than-usual brush with death reminds all of Mopsie’s grandchildren that they ought to be visiting her in hospice more frequently. As a result, readers see Buffi spending time with her siblings, especially her excommunicated brother, David, and even her persistently antagonizing mother. Buffi and her family pass many hours reminiscing and sorting through Mopsie’s belongings, and Neal’s straightforward, richly detailed prose offers a cornucopia of family memories painting a vibrant picture of Buffi’s childhood. With both insight and humor, Neal describes many of her family’s offbeat experiences, such as living with their Christian mother on an Israeli kibbutz, her mother’s affair with a married man and her sister’s kidnapping by Mopsie. Buffi concludes that Mopsie’s stubborn refusal to die must be a sign of unfinished business on this Earth. Although at moments the book reads more like a personal tribute to her family and less like a factual work meant for the public, Neal’s affection for her family is so palpable it nearly jumps off the page. Readers will find themselves hoping Buffi will finally discover her distinctive place in this family she so clearly adores.
An enjoyable, moving read about the pleasure of being just a little bit different.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1451591019
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 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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