Candid and heartfelt, though at times penitential in tone.
An evangelical activist's account of the troubled relationship between his family and his rebellious, drug-addicted son.
Mansfield was determined not to make the same mistakes parenting his children that his own well-meaning but distant father made with him. When his first child, Nate, was born, he vowed to engage in the kind of "intentional parenting" that would help him acknowledge Nate's "personal worth and value” on a daily basis. He and his wife worked hard at creating what they believed was a happy life for Nate, which included bedtime stories, road trips and plenty of family celebrations. But what Mansfield didn't realize was that by being so child-focused and not letting Nate (and later, his two younger siblings) "own their feelings" during moments of conflict, he was unwittingly modeling selfish and self-centered behaviors to his children. This in turn manifested in such unwanted behaviors as vicious fights between Nate and his sister, who at times looked and sounded as though "they were auditioning for roles in Lord of the Flies.” All three of Mansfield's children eventually learned to love God, but it was his eldest son who began to use drugs and challenge authority. Nate's descent into addiction led to run-ins with the law and, later, a felony conviction for drug possession. The greatest tragedy, though, came after his release. Just when Nate had made a commitment to changing his life, he died, a victim of prescription drug abuse. Mansfield takes much of the blame for what happened to his son, but as he does so, he also suggests that the child-centered approach to parenting endorsed by the Christian community may have been flawed.
Candid and heartfelt, though at times penitential in tone.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7851-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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