A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.
The widower of murdered pop star Selena reveals poignant details of their short time together as a couple.
In the early 1990s, Selena Quintanilla shook up the world of Tejano, a hybrid of Mexican and American music, by fronting an energetic young band that included guitarist Chris Perez. Initially more interested in Selena’s strong voice and the band’s innovative take on tradition than in romance, Perez soon found himself falling head over heels for Selena. Perez portrays his girlfriend and eventual wife—they eloped in 1992 after growing weary of concealing their relationship from Selena’s overly protective father—as a spirited daredevil with a heart of gold. She was an animal lover, motorcycle enthusiast and emerging fashion designer whose religious beliefs grounded her within the chaotic music industry. Unfortunately, Selena’s trusting nature led her to welcome a dangerous woman, Yolanda Saldivar, into her inner circle. As Selena’s fan-club president and personal assistant, Saldivar soon proved to be unstable, manipulative and larcenous. Perez calls her a “cancer,” an epithet that would turn out to be tragically apt when Saldivar killed Selena in 1995, shooting her in the back and causing internal bleeding. Recounting the day that Selena died as well as the ensuing funeral, Perez captures these events in heartbreaking detail. At one point, he writes, he wanted nothing more than to crawl into the coffin with her and pull down the lid. Given Perez’s easygoing, confidential tone throughout the book, this image carries an emotional weight that it would not have had coming from a melodramatic storyteller. The ending of the book feels somewhat rushed, though, as Perez duly notes his descent into depression and substance abuse, his rebound and his eventual remarriage and fatherhood.
A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-41404-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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