An uneven chronicle reveals the joys and tribulations of New England sisters.
A debut memoir follows a large family in rural Connecticut.
Plimpton was born in 1949 near Lyme in southern Connecticut. Her maternal grandmother, Maria Bull, was one of 10 Harding sisters who grew up in the area. In this book, Plimpton relates what she remembers of the sisters’ lives, a task that was passed down by her mother, Elizebeth. The author says her mother was “the true writer in the family” and also had an interest in local history and genealogy. She encouraged Plimpton to recount the “many great stories” of the Harding sisters. The author begins with eight chapters portraying the sisters and their one surviving brother. As she remembers little of some sisters, passages are short and factual: general demeanor, a brief anecdote, an obituary. Plimpton spends more time on Helen, who became her “Nana” after Maria died. She discusses the shared family farmhouse, the chicken coop that became a playhouse, Helen’s constant and welcome company, and the dramatic suicide of Helen’s second husband. The second half of the volume features short chapters about family routines: visiting various households, going to Sunday school and church, relishing holiday memories. Plimpton’s life—and those of the Harding sisters—does not seem particularly unusual so the “great stories” are all in the telling. The author’s writing is crisp, but, unfortunately, she moves too quickly through facts without pausing long enough for readers to get to know (or even sort out) the many sisters, husbands, and children. Intriguing images—such as young Plimpton and her friend Nancy Adams penning and selling a weekly newsletter called HOT NEWS and creating clubs in the old chicken coop—are skimmed over. The author does devote a chapter to a long-standing family feud that caused the ostracism of Plimpton’s mother by all but one Harding sister. But again, she focuses more on facts than storytelling. With her addition of a family tree, marriage records, and many photos, the book reads more like a historical record—or notes for a forthcoming narrative—than a memoir. The work will most likely appeal to historians and members of the author’s family.
An uneven chronicle reveals the joys and tribulations of New England sisters.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6049-9
Page Count: 110
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
