Next book

DON'T LET ME DOWN

A MEMOIR

A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.

A successful literary agent recounts her life and especially her relationship with her father, who was “a mass of contradictions: a pacifist and a tyrant, an optimist with demons, a hippie and a conservative, a proud father and jerk, and a boy and a man.”

Hosier (co-author: Hit So Hard, 2017) has long dealt with unresolved “daddy issues,” but she thought she had tucked the baggage neatly away—that is, until her mother sold the family home and, salvaging the last few childhood relics, the author dug out a Beatles-heavy stack of inherited records. After that opening scene, Hosier proceeds to detail her life story, one closely intertwined with her father, who reared the household on the entire Fab Four canon. “The Beatles records…had provided the soundtrack to our lives and seen us through every great joy and tragedy,” she writes. “Dad and I used those songs to both connect with and escape from each other, to both understand and rebel against each other.” Titled with songs from “Blackbird” to “Hey Jude,” each chapter reveals chronological milestones that shaped the author’s coming-of-age in rural 1980s Ohio. Underneath what seemed an idyllic “Here Comes the Sun” childhood stirred a controlling father who became increasingly volatile. Eventually, writes Hosier, life became “the anxiety of constantly walking on eggshells, the need for order and control, [and] the impulse to try to save others while losing [myself].” Permeated with events like church boot camp and school graduations, the narrative is near cinematic with insights about gender roles, love, and sex gained through experiences involving her parents, romantic relationships, God, and rock music. Struggling through a host of various traumas both minor and major, her mother’s inability to break free, and her father’s battle with cancer and eventual death, Hosier delivers a memoir that is less about chasing an identity and more about having one cast upon her and coming to terms with it.

A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4516-4495-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 21


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 21


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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)

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

Close Quickview