A nostalgic memoir of a childhood lived between two cultures. The daughter of Italian parents, now a US citizen, freelance journalist and novelist De Ferrari (A Cloud on Sand, 1990) recounts her idyllic girlhood in Tacna, Peru, and the roots of her Latina identity. Sheltered by her family's wealth and the insularity of her small town, De Ferrari grew up a gringa among Latinos. In brief chapters, she details her world: nurturing parents, whom she idolized; the family servants, important household figures who cosseted the girl and told her stories that figured crucially in her imaginative life; her luxurious house and garden. Those first 15 years in Tacna were not without strife. The author was eventually sent to school in England, in part because her wealth made it difficult for her Peruvian classmates to accept her. (The rejection still rankles: Of a former rival's ill fortune, she writes, ``I wonder what the mother superior would think of her pet student now.'') De Ferrari's prose ranges from the evocative, as in a description of a room that smells ``as if candles had been burning and wet mud had been mixed with the fragrance of lilies,'' to the clichÇd, as in a picture of her father having ``striking blue eyes and a wide forehead that bespoke his great intelligence.'' English, her third language, is the vehicle for her ``most complicated thoughts,'' yet she does not delve too deeply into the emotional consequences of a multicultural identity. She mentions how Peru has changed for the worse (pollution, terrorism, corruption) but only grazes core political issues, and although she describes her social position as a wealthy Peruvian, she doesn't fully acknowledge its impact on the poorer people around her. Readers gain entrÇe into a rarefied, intriguing world, but the tale is rather sparse and short on discovery. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-70934-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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