Unsentimental in its character portrayals and forthright yet humorous in its depiction of devastated innocence and family...
A writer and photographer’s wry but poignant account of her hardscrabble childhood and adolescence in rural New England.
Peppe grew up on an isolated Maine farm the youngest child of nine. Her housewife mother left school after eighth grade, and her ex-Army father worked as the fix-it man for the local post office. They struggled to keep afloat financially, yet pride kept them from admitting they were anything but middle class. In their chaotic household, the eldest children occupied themselves with smoking, drinking, fighting and sex. Peppe only added to the furor with her penchant for asking questions that her harried parents could never answer, like whether or not it was “sad for live chickens to see [them] plucking the dead ones.” To everyone in her family, Peppe became “queer.” She was the little girl whose deep sympathy for animals and inability to see the ones she loved get slaughtered for food drove her to become a vegetarian. She escaped the harshness of her environment by seeking the companionship of animals, especially dogs and horses. Peppe also immersed herself in books by British veterinarian James Herriot and, later, fellow Mainer Stephen King, whose terrifying fictional worlds “seemed so much safer than [her] own reality.” By the time she entered high school, she had survived not only the taunts and coldness of her family, but also sexual assault. Peppe began dating a pastor’s pianist son who looked “a bit like a chimpanzee” but played like he belonged at Juilliard. Parental disapproval and a miscarriage at age 16 only served to strengthen the bond between Peppe and the boy, who became her future husband.
Unsentimental in its character portrayals and forthright yet humorous in its depiction of devastated innocence and family dysfunction, Peppe’s book is a celebration of difference, resilience and the healing power of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82272-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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