One autobiography is enough for most people, even successful politicians. Writing a second suggests a certain self-obsession, but this is not what comes through the prose of Ferraro’s most recent effort (after Ferraro: My Story, not reviewed). She begins with the story of her realization that the unheralded efforts of her mother and grandmother were fundamental contributions to the achievements of their daughter and granddaughter. The early chapters of the book recount the harsh, difficult circumstances in which her immigrant grandmother came to this country, struggled to survive, and was caught between the expectations of an old world and the opportunities of a new world. Her first-generation mother became a bridge, a woman who could not herself realize the independence and potential of an American woman, but who could make the American dream a reality for her daughter. From this stock Ferraro emerged an educated, strong, and ambitious woman, who believed fate was something to be shaped rather than endured. Too much of the second half of the book focuses on Ferraro’s political career, remaining in touch with the family/roots theme only occasionally, and one wishes that greater insight into her relationships with her own daughters, especially given the demands her career must have placed on her time and family life, would have been provided. Nevertheless, this is an interesting, undeniably moving account of a maternal lineage lovingly written by a woman self-consciously embracing her foremothers. The most enduring image is Ferraro’s presentation of what it means for parents to make genuinely selfless sacrifices for their children. What we see in these pages is not only an expression of the will to endure hardships to benefit one’s child, but also the foresight and humility to embrace a goal for that child which included living a different life than that of her parents. (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85404-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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