A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.
One young woman's struggle with her faith.
As Luce discovered, being the daughter of the well-known youth evangelist and co-founder of Teen Mania Ministries, Ron Luce, was no small task, especially as she grew into her teens and began to question her faith in God. With the help of Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; co-author: The Woman Who Wasn't There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception, 2012, etc.), Luce delves into the complex world of personal faith, of growing up hearing one strict version of the Bible while feeling and believing that other variations of Christianity were possible, versions that tolerated same-sex marriage, drinking alcohol and the right to question religious texts. Although she dearly loved her father and enjoyed their long talks on car rides and mission trips, she didn’t always support his rhetoric. "Papa had come to his own conclusions about God and the church, and I was forming my own,” she writes. “We didn’t have to agree. However it all shook out I would respect Papa's beliefs, and I hoped that he would respect me for searching so long and hard to find mine." Confused and conflicted, Luce relied on her two best friends, Austin and Garrett, for emotional, physical and spiritual support. Then her world was devastated when the small plane she was traveling in with these two friends and two others crashed, killing everyone onboard except Luce. What followed was physical trauma as well as the extreme guilt and anguish she felt at being the sole survivor. After months of recovery, Luce discovered the answers to the questions for which she had been searching for so long.
A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2960-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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