An informative, if overstuffed, hiking account that’s brimming with captivating high energy.
A memoir brings readers along step by step on a man’s hiking adventures through the trails of western Canada’s National Park System.
With two months of free time between assignments—Obasohan worked in the field of protection for workers in nuclear power plants—the author decided to make use of his closet full of unused hiking and camping equipment. In his book, he describes himself as an adventurer rather than a hiker. Even after trekking by foot over 212 km (131 miles), he maintains that he is not a hiker. Nonetheless, in July 2021, Obasohan set out by car from Ontario, heading west toward Saskatchewan. His first solo backcountry trip was in Grasslands National Park, where he set up his tent in the Valley of a Thousand Devils, a name that inspired his persistently active imagination. He writes of hours spent walking in the intense heat with no shade in sight: “It was as hot as hell. I couldn’t see them, but I must have been close to a devil’s lair, several lairs possibly for every degree the temperature rose.” There were other dangers, some fanciful, others real. Bears—and, later, cougars—were constantly roaming in almost all the parks he visited. Yet he chose to remain “bear aware” rather than carry bear spray. Next up was Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, a six-hour drive from those tricky devils, continuing his journey driving and hiking, moving westward on his way to the trails in British Columbia. With a peppering of acerbic commentary—“I could see his canister of bear spray in a holster on his hip. This is the Canadian version of open carry firearms”—Obasohan maintains an articulate, conversational banter throughout the narrative. His descriptions of scenery, topography, and activities are vivid and visceral, albeit sometimes exhaustingly detailed. Readers accompany him as he jumps from stone to stone across streams, traipses through cool forests (with too many spiderwebs), sinks into swampy patches of mud, and climbs up and down hills and mountains, compulsively pushing his body to its limits. It is a reading experience that is best appreciated in intermittent bites.
An informative, if overstuffed, hiking account that’s brimming with captivating high energy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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