A cluttered but historically intriguing immigration tale.
A debut biography focuses on the author’s great-great-grandmother, who arrived in Australia in 1818 at the age of 4.
Just 30 years after the English began arriving in Australia, little Sarah Elizabeth and her two older brothers (James and Henry) boarded a convict ship. Their mother, Martha, found guilty of possessing a forged bank note in England, had been sentenced to serve 14 years in Australia. But Martha died during the arduous journey, and Sarah’s father, Samuel Hale, was already serving indentured time in Australia. Sarah was therefore considered an orphan and placed in foster care, where she remained until she was old enough to enter the Female Orphan School (most likely when she turned age 5). In 1823, Samuel was able to reclaim Sarah and James from their respective orphanages (there appears to be no record of what happened to Henry), and he brought them with him to Cabramatta (now a suburb of Sydney). At only 14, she married a “government servant” (a “constable”), 34-year-old James Smith. He too had been sent to Australia as a convict. But Smith died in 1839, leaving Sarah a 25-year-old widow with four young children. She then threw her lot in with one Henry Harren, with whom she had another three children, and they eventually moved to rustic Melbourne. Although Tregear’s intent was to write a tribute to her great-great-grandmother, the slim volume is overloaded with names, dates, and extra threads relative to secondary and ancillary characters. Readers learn the broad details of Sarah’s long and difficult life, but her voice remains a mystery. The narrative’s greatest strength rests in its historical overview of the fledgling British colony that initially served as a depository for criminals. The author includes shipping manifests and legal proceedings concerning the mistreatment of prisoners during the arduous sea journeys, and she has done prodigious research into the social climate of the day. Speaking of one girl at the Female Orphan School who was disciplined for climbing a tree, Tregear writes: “The committee decided to punish Mary Ann by having ‘a log attached to her right leg.’ ”
A cluttered but historically intriguing immigration tale.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984500-19-9
Page Count: 108
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2018
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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