An intelligent and bracing memoir.
An independent film producer’s story of how she grew up dominated by her charismatic, troubled father but managed to break free of his influence.
Norris' hard-living Greek-American father, Jimmy, was larger than life. A fisherman, hunter, and racetrack gambler fascinated by violence, he often took the family to see slasher movies at the local drive-in. There, he playfully scared his daughter by transforming his hand into what she called “the Hairy Claw.” But Norris knew better. “I had seen that hand rip out the still-warm guts of dead animals ten times my size,” writes the author. Jimmy often humiliated Norris, her mother, and sister with his misogynistic comments and behavior, but the author loved her father and identified with him to the point where her colorful, slangy English was virtually indistinguishable from what Jimmy used. At the same time, she also found herself longing to be like her friend Susan, a beautiful and talented rich girl who was “really going places” and whom even Jimmy could not fault. Then Susan’s father murdered her mother, and her mother’s lover and Susan descended into personal chaos. At the same time, the Norris household began to unravel as Jimmy became more erratic and eventually threatened to kill his own long-suffering wife. The author escaped by becoming the only member of her working-class family to go to college, where she immersed herself in the filmmaking that became her life's work. Away from her home and the father who terrorized it, Norris finally began the slow process of learning how to remove the words that her father put into her mouth “like a ventriloquist.” By turns heartbreaking and darkly humorous, the book not only offers a compelling yet comic portrayal of a fraught father-daughter relationship. Norris also reveals the way violence can become a self-replicating cancer within families.
An intelligent and bracing memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941393-60-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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