A decent cultural study, but many readers may desire more analysis and wisdom.
In her debut memoir, Wilson portrays our culture’s intolerance of homosexuality through a mother-daughter story of dysfunction, loss and empowerment.
The author chronicles her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, her coming of age in the ’70s and the reestablishment of her relationship with her mother as an adult. The first part of the narrative relates how Gloria, Wilson’s mother, attempted suicide at least three times before Wilson was 12. Gloria spent extensive time in mental hospitals and was subjected to heavy medication and shock therapy. Partly because of her mother’s lack of parenting, Wilson tried to make herself nearly invisible to please those around her. She fled to college at Grinnell in Iowa and then to San Francisco to find herself. There she became active in both the gay-rights and women’s-liberation movements and came out to her friends and family as a lesbian. As Gloria healed and found her voice, Wilson discovered that her mother was also a lesbian and that her depression was fueled by intolerance for her lifestyle choice. Eventually the author and her mother reconnected, and the final part of the book outlines her mother’s death from cancer and the resolution and boundary setting that occurred before she died. While the book takes place during a dynamic time for lesbians and society as a whole, Wilson offers very little reflection and synthesis. As a practicing psychotherapist, the author has the tools to dig deeper, but the story unfolds as a straightforward, chronological series of events.
A decent cultural study, but many readers may desire more analysis and wisdom.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58005-432-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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