A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.
A novelist revisits the country of her upbringing to learn her family’s story.
When she was 23 and living in Chicago, Colombia native Rojas Contreras endured a bout of amnesia, “just a few weeks of oblivion,” when she “crashed my bicycle into an opening car door.” For eight weeks, “I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year.” As horrifying as that episode was, she was luckier than her mother: At age 8, Mami fell down a well in Ocaña, Colombia, after she felt “a hand on the small of her back, giving her a gentle push.” When she recovered eight months later, Mami had “the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices,” a gift her curandero (Latinx healer) father, Nono, had also possessed. In this poetic memoir, Rojas Contreras writes of the return trip she and her mother took to Colombia in 2012 to disinter Nono’s bones and tell his story. As the author writes, he was a man who knew “instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds”—the “secrets” Mami had inherited. Though the author too often relies on platitudes—e.g., “No one is above suffering”; “Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know”—the book derives considerable power from both her reminiscences of growing up in a nation where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries left bombs throughout Bogotá and its portrait of a loving family filled with colorful characters. Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors—she writes of the “highly destructive and orchestrated oppression” of Black and Indigenous peoples—as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims.
A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54666-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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