Pantaeva, an Eskimo raised in Siberia who quickly shot from being a little girl with big dreams to a young woman with an international modeling career, spins a fantastic biographical saga out of an impressive store of encounters. From serving tea to the Dalai Lama in Russia to flopping down the streets of Manhattan in a pair of sneakers borrowed from fashion photographer Irving Penn, Pantaeva has made an adventure-filled trip to superstardom. Spurred through an arduous early life in a poor Siberian city by a strong sense of her own potential, a supportive family, and an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, Pantaeva colorfully sketches a mystical account of her journey to success. The story is intriguing partly because she deals with the themes that shaped her identity—her Buryat Eskimo heritage, her belief in the power of fate—instead of bragging about the glamour of the camera or complaining about the hardships of her formative years. There are, however, two faults that detract from the overall presentation. First, events are often jumbled and disjointedly strung together, making it difficult for readers to discern the exact location or the date of an episode. Second, Pantaeva frequently substitutes understanding gained through hindsight for her original unfiltered experiences; for example, when she describes her early childhood, she expresses a deeper understanding of events than it’s believable that a three-year-old could have. But once Pantaeva’s ability to express herself catches up with her predilection for finding tremendous importance in the smallest gestures, this discontinuity disappears. Pantaeva’s vignettes possess an appealingly improvisational quality that conveys how tenuously connected episodes can eventually congeal into a recognizable theme. Though technically an autobiography, Siberian Dream reads more like an intriguing fairy tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97554-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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