A sincere, though at times predictable, account of a momentous physical and emotional journey.
In this debut memoir, an aging son embarks on a trek to secure a final resting place for his father’s ashes and his turbulent childhood memories.
Abell is a retired industrial designer and a native of Wisconsin, a place, he notes, that has diverse topography but no big mountains. As a child with alcoholic parents, he developed an interest in “rarified air” by perusing his father’s mountaineering books and noticing that his father “was never in pain when he spoke of the Himalaya.” Abell was in his 50s when he began to summit high peaks himself—Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro among them—usually with his wife or one or both of his sons in tow. The memoir chronicles his “most deep-seated dream of all”: a nine-day hike at the age of 59 to Nepal’s Mount Everest Base Camp, elevation of around 17,500 feet, where he planned to spread the last of his father’s ashes. This short, elegant book contains few surprises. Everest’s base camp is a well-known tourist destination, and Abell chose an expedition sponsored by Himalayan Experience, one of the best outfitters available. Chapters progress from his arrival in smoggy Katmandu to his final ascent toward the stony base camp in the shadow of the world’s highest mountain. Aside from a bout with altitude sickness, Abell was rarely out of his comfort zone. Instead, drama in the narrative arises from strategically placed flashbacks, so readers learn more with each passing step about what has led him to this particular place. Abell is a patient, careful storyteller; the descriptions of his parents, who seem like terrific people and horrific alcoholics at the same time, are illuminating. Yet readers get few specifics on Abell’s own challenges with alcoholism. Still, his candor is refreshing: “I hadn’t come here to pretend I was Reinhold Messner or some other great mountaineer.” Overall, the book is a testament to the author’s sustained gratitude for his life and his loved ones.
A sincere, though at times predictable, account of a momentous physical and emotional journey.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1494367381
Page Count: 118
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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