An unsentimental and inspiring depiction of rising out of atrocious circumstances.
An artist’s epistolary girlhood memoir of abandonment, poverty, and survival.
The very existence of this book, notes Alarcón in his introduction, is remarkable—perhaps more so than what is in it. As a Colombian native who established herself as a painter in Europe, Reyes didn’t know how to read or write when most of the events occurred. She never knew her father and didn’t know her mother was her mother. One day, a boy “asked me if I had a dad and a mom, and I asked him what those were, and he said he didn’t know either.” Reyes spent much of her early life locked in rooms, watched by no one, even taking care of the infant son born to the woman she didn’t know was her mother—until the woman abandoned that boy when the author was 4: “That day remains, without a doubt, the cruelest of my life.” Reyes and her sister would soon be next, reluctantly taken in by a convent, where they were continually questioned about their lineage; if they had been born in sin, they couldn’t be baptized, confirmed, and saved. But they could be exploited, made to do the work that was beneath the others and accepting their fate “because we were daughters of the street, because we were poor, because we were stupid, despicable, pitiful beings.” Reyes spent 15 formative years there, praying in a Latin she didn’t understand but was forced to memorize in order to escape a hell that seemed all too real. The memoir ends on the verge of her leaving, giving no hint of the extraordinary life that would involve close friendships with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, “as part of a Latin American and European cultural elite.” She mesmerized her friends with stories of her childhood, and one of them suggested that she write them down. This book is the result, posthumously published in 2012 to great acclaim in her native Colombia.
An unsentimental and inspiring depiction of rising out of atrocious circumstances.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-310868-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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