An uninspiring collection of recollections, but one that avid fans of Christian memoirs may enjoy.
A devout Catholic grandmother offers a memoir in which she shares her glimpses of God’s everyday miracles.
When most women are looking forward to retirement, Panaggio’s new life was about to begin. She’d just divorced her husband of 29 years, and had stopped the heavy drinking and partying that had been so much a part of her life. She also found a renewed devotion to God. In this brief, 100-page memoir, Panaggio shares a journal she kept for 28 years, beginning from her 1981 divorce. Her life is full of inspiring achievements: She spent her golden years acting in plays, commercials and even the occasional movie, running a modeling school, working as a talent scout, and in her spare time, writing poems and short stories. (The book cover mentions her 1998 chapbook Into the Spirit, A Poetic Witness and a few anthologies that included her works.) Those promising trappings, though, fall somewhat flat on the page. Instead, the book reads like an assortment of notes, jumping from one person, place or thing to the next, like a stone skimming across a lake. Readers learn that John, Panaggio’s co-star in a production of Fiddler on the Roof, died of AIDS, that her Aunt Angie gave her $600 to publish her poetry collection, and that her friend Marie accompanied her on a trip to Arizona. But readers receive little insight into who all these people really are; even the author’s children and grandchildren remain virtual strangers in these seemingly random entries. One consistent thread runs through these entries: the author’s belief in God’s power. To every friend, she offers a blessing, a prayer, or at the very least, a promise of salvation. However, grammatical and spelling errors crop up as often as Bible quotes; for example, the book describes an emotionless actor as too “blaze,” and reports that Panaggio went on an “Elder Hostile.”
An uninspiring collection of recollections, but one that avid fans of Christian memoirs may enjoy.Pub Date: April 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450062657
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
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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