An unsentimental yet affecting memoir.
An award-winning journalist’s account of how she came to terms with the accidental drowning death of her beloved companion and father of her two children.
When Aitkenhead met Tony, she was a successful writer for the Guardian who had grown up with two bohemian parents. He was a charming mixed-race crack addict who “wholesaled cocaine for a living” and smelled of “designer cologne and cannabis.” Both were married, but in time, they developed a powerful attraction to each other and left their respective spouses to become “the most implausible couple I had ever known.” Their challenging but ultimately happy union came to a tragic end 10 years later on a beach in Jamaica where Tony died trying to save their small son from drowning. Aitkenhead remembers her partner—who defied all stereotypes of a street-hustling gangster—with deep affection. “Although a criminal, he was trustworthy and surprisingly guileless,” she writes, and had a “deep hippy streak” that manifested in a love of camping, cooking, and children. A few years into their relationship, the author discovered that she was pregnant and left Tony out of fear for what his crack habit would do to their child. Unwilling to lose her, Tony immediately joined a Cocaine Anonymous group and ended all crack use. He embraced his role as father and later as a charity worker who helped “desperately dispossessed children” from dysfunctional households. With Aitkenhead’s encouragement, Tony went to college and earned a degree in psychology and criminology. That she and her partner were able to learn from each other and work through their race and class differences to form a cohesive family unit makes the book memorable. But in the end, it is the author’s resilience after her lover’s death—which she describes with poised eloquence—that renders the narrative especially satisfying.
An unsentimental yet affecting memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54065-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 14, 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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