A revealing memoir, though one that perhaps reveals aspects of the author’s character she didn't intend to showcase.
In her first book, Occupy Wall Street protester McMillan tells the story of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment and the personal history that shaped her activism.
On St. Patrick’s Day in 2012, McMillan, then a graduate student and nanny, was arrested for elbowing a police officer in the eye during a celebration of the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in New York’s Zuccotti Park. She was convicted and spent 58 days in the jail at Rikers Island. Her outraged memoir lingers over the night of the arrest and the trial while skimming over her time in jail, which led her to a new role as an advocate for prison reform. The activist claims that she just stopped by the park for a few minutes to meet up with a friend, after a long evening of bar-hopping with another friend, and that she was assaulted by a police officer there and went into a series of seizures that left her with only scattered memories of the night. Her blow-by-blow account of the trial—during which, she writes, her lawyers were “saints, for sure,” the judge “made it abundantly clear that he didn’t like me or my lawyers,” and McMillan dressed and made herself up to look like “Activist Barbie”—is peppered with exclamation points and full of outrage. The book opens with a long and not particularly enlightening description of the author’s youth, in which she bounced among the homes of her divorced parents, her grandparents, and a teacher who was temporarily willing to take her in after she emancipated herself at 16. Behavioral problems caused her to be kicked out of one home after another. In her account, other people are shadowy figures that seem to exist only insofar as they impact her life positively or negatively.
A revealing memoir, though one that perhaps reveals aspects of the author’s character she didn't intend to showcase.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-538-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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