Ambitious amalgam of ethnic and personal history.
In this debut memoir, an Armenian-American woman details her family background, health issues, and literary education and craft.
Pilibosian was born in 1933 to survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her memoir leads off with “the background our lives were played against, the Armenian lives of my parents before they had immigrated, and our Armenian or American lives here.” She then largely shifts to her saga of growing up in an Armenian-American community in Watertown, Massachusetts. Since she was shy and “lacked ambition to go to college though my marks in school were very good,” Pilibosian went to secretarial school but soon also took humanities courses through Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, ultimately earning a “bachelor equivalent” degree. Early in adulthood, Pilibosian also experienced depression that required psychotherapy and shock treatments. She married an Armenian man, whom her parents recommended and who worked as a typesetter, and she traveled abroad with him as part of trips to visit his family in Lebanon. She gave birth to two children, got editorial work at an Armenian-American newspaper and the Harvard University Printing Office, and wrote poetry that got published. As a young mother, she experienced cardiac arrest during routine surgery, resulting in four days of lost consciousness. Later, in middle age, while walking in a cemetery, she experienced a mystical lifting of mood. Now in retirement, she and her husband run the small press they founded, and her memoir concludes with a discussion of poetry and other writing. Pilibosian sets out to cover a lot of ground in this expansive memoir. Her overview of Armenian cultural history and descriptions of literary studies hold some interest, though at times they also sit rather awkwardly alongside the underlying drama of her medical and mental health issues, which remain a bit mysterious. Pilibosian clearly loves poetry, and her discussions in this area represent some of the more heartfelt expressions in this book. Indeed, there’s something rather haunting about this somewhat stilted memoir, with Pilibosian acknowledging that only later in life did she learn the value of humor, “because my upbringing had been humorless.”
Ambitious amalgam of ethnic and personal history.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1929966080
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Ohan Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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