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THE BOOK OF EMMA REYES

Name: THE BOOK OF EMMA REYES
Author: Emma Reyes
ISBN: 978-0-14-310868-9

A MEMOIR

by Emma Reyes ; translated by Daniel Alarcón ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017

An unsentimental and inspiring depiction of rising out of atrocious circumstances.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)