A foster child who ricocheted around the system and emerged as Miss Teen USA writes trenchantly about her experiences. Daughter of a mentally disturbed Puerto Rican mother, raised in a series of foster homes in chilly Vermont, Lopez grew up rootless and confused about her identity and her future. By the time she was a year old, she had experienced two foster placements; at three, she was on her fourth. The fifth foster family, the Wensleys, provided a home for the next 11 years. Although she had been separated early on from her older brother, Lopez's younger sister, Diana, stuck with her from home to home, in line with generally accepted social service practice: Keep siblings together, if possible. They anchored each other through a long period of adjustment; Diana settled in at the Wensleys while Charlotte never stopped feeling dislocated. She yearned to be adopted. The Wensleys, willing at first, grew reluctant. ``Adopting two impoverished kids was a huge financial commitment,'' Lopez writes, ``which they feared they would not be able to afford.'' Charlotte, by then a teenager, began clashing so frequently with her foster family that she moved to a group home. She began her quest to be Miss Teen USA, winning the title in 1992. It gave her a unique opportunity to become a spokeswoman for foster children. She was also reunited with her brother and adopted, at the age of 17, by a Vermont couple. The book's final chapter has suggestions for the professionals, which boil down to: Listen to the children; they know what's missing in their lives and where it hurts. Written in plain and simple prose (with the help of Dworkin, coauthor of The Ms. Guide to Women's Health), this is a story of a foster child who made good—and is seizing the opportunity to become an eloquent spokeswoman for all those children who have shared her predicament. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81199-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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