A moving, enlightening study of loss and its surprising consequences.
A bereft daughter’s journey through grief and healing.
In her debut memoir, Huntress tells the story of her parents’ untimely deaths from cancer and the profound effects of those tragedies on her and her brothers. The author leads readers through her own personal history, beginning with her picturesque 1980s New England childhood and later focusing on her constant search for home and belonging that began with her father’s death. She presents her memoir as a series of detailed, chronological vignettes, and despite its wrenching subject matter, Huntress skillfully avoids self-pity; instead, she evokes the clear voices of her younger selves, immersing readers in the past as she experienced it. As a child, for example, she noted that grieving “is the name for what happens on the insides of everyone left behind after someone dies.” Her careful exploration of her evolving perspectives on mourning and growth is one of her book’s greatest strengths. The narrative does lack momentum at times, particularly in later chapters, which focus on the minutiae of the author’s therapy sessions, but even these sections retain a meditative sense of personal reflection. Readers coping with their own losses may find Huntress’ story particularly affecting, but many of her sharp insights are universal. One particularly vivid passage asks: “I wonder if they named it the rib cage because it is designed to hold in our hearts, to cage up the wild and terrible residue of living.” The author uses the loss of her parents as a starting point for broader philosophical journeys, as she strives to understand how the past connects to the present and future: “Maybe this is how the true past really is,” she writes. “You can try to bury it away in a safe place so you can revisit it just as it was whenever you want, but years later when you go to retrieve it, no matter how long you dig, it still eludes you.” Her reconstruction of her own past, elusive as it may be, results in a rich, ultimately hopeful read that thoughtfully contributes to age-old discussions of life and love.
A moving, enlightening study of loss and its surprising consequences.Pub Date: March 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492956341
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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