A son’s loving and determined quest to discover the mother he never knew—the young woman who died, at 19, shortly after giving birth to her twin sons. Beyond these harsh and tragic facts, Peggy remained a mystery to novelist and memoirist Snyder (The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Lost Job and a Found Life, 1997, etc.) for nearly 50 years. Then, coming to terms with his father’s rapidly declining health and powers of memory, Snyder was gripped with an overpowering need to understand who his mother was. From photographs, conversations with relatives and friends, and some genuine detective work, this volume was born. It’s Snyder’s gift to his ailing father, to his mother (the girl his father loved), and to all people “in love, or out of it, or trying to stay in love” with the person they have pledged themselves to. It is, ultimately, a gift to himself—an urgent reminder of the need to cherish his own family. Re-creating one parent’s love story and discovering the inner life of a 19-year-old woman one never knew can be an intimidating task in the best of circumstances. Snyder faced additional obstacles. Peggy kept her feelings to herself, shared her father’s dark moods, and died of uncertain causes. By dint of careful research and plain good luck, Snyder discovers the true cause of his mother’s death—preeclampsia—and her fatal sacrifice in delivering her babies. By entering into his mother’s world with the eye of a writer and the determination of a man possessed, Snyder discovers the vulnerable young woman who found unquestioned love with his father. Of Time and Memory is not so much a biography as a “story.” One has to suspend disbelief when the narrative re-creates scenes that the author could only have invented, but then imagination must play a role in telling any love story. At his best, Snyder offers poignant glimpses into everyday family situations, reminding us of the love present in our own lives. A bittersweet story.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40408-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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