A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.
The daughter of legendary sportscaster George Michael recalls their fractious relationship.
On author Cindi Michael’s 16th birthday, her father, then the host of the popular sports highlights TV show The George Michael Sports Machine, wrote her: “No father in this world has ever had a better daughter bring him more pride than you bring me.” Yet by her first year in college, she says, he’d effectively disowned her, and, a few years before his death in 2009, he told her not to contact him “EVER,” accusing her of causing “more pain and heartache than I could tolerate.” As one of three children, she basked in her father’s love as a young girl, but that love, she writes, “had to be earned” due to her father’s perfectionist expectations. The difficulties accelerated, she says, after her parents separated in 1973, when she was 8; she recalls lamenting that she “hadn’t said enough bad things about my mother” during a custody hearing. When she later suggested family therapy, she says that her father responded, “Ain’t no way in hell I’m doing that.” The disowning appears to have been triggered, in part, by the author’s affair at 18 with the vice principal of her high school, an experience she says she might have avoided “If only I hadn’t been so starved for love.” In this memoir, Michael meticulously traces the agonizing course of a fractious relationship that still haunts her. There is, of course, no shortage of memoirs about benighted families, but the author, who says that she’s also estranged from her sister, is unflinching in her self-analysis in this remembrance: “Twenty years later, I am still trying to figure out if the strength of my love for them is a blessing or a curse,” she writes. Now a mother of two herself, she provides the insight that “the past—a difficult one anyway—can only be laid to rest when we have examined and understood it.” Burying the past, she says, “was my father’s greatest downfall.”
A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-107-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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