An intimate, somewhat gloomy, account of resilience.
A detailed memoir blends prose and poetry to tell the story of a woman’s struggle to overcome the pain of loss and abuse.
Born in New York in 1942, Rapp describes herself as “the daughter of a strong mother / And a weak father.” She recounts a painful childhood, an insecure adolescence, and an uncomfortable adulthood all characterized by repeated incidents of rejection and cruelty at the hands of her parents and boyfriends, some casually dismissive, some outright abusive. Rebellious and passive by turns, Rapp was a dogged survivor, using her skills to forge a stable career as a rehabilitation counselor to help disabled people access their rights and benefits. Her search for love was less successful; she seemed to drift from one unsuccessful relationship to another against the backdrop of the societal changes of the 1960s and ’70s. Occasional poems accent the text with an emotional perspective on events, and the last section of the book is a collection of 24 poems titled “The End of Innocence.” Some, like “Central Park Summer,” employ almost the exact wording of the prose section; others offer personal comments on events such as the 9/11 attacks and the Sandy Hook school shooting. While Rapp’s frankness adds interest, her storytelling is frequently flat. For example, about her boyfriend Larry’s struggle with impotence, she writes: “He went to a doctor, who gave him a shot and his problem was cured.” The overall bleak tone might benefit from more flashes of humor, such as the sly paragraph that introduces the book: “I must have been a miracle baby because my parents slept in separate beds in my room and did not talk to each other except to argue, yet they made me.”
An intimate, somewhat gloomy, account of resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5150-8104-3
Page Count: 182
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
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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