A poignantly intimate memoir.
A distinguished editor and writer’s tale of the people and events surrounding her first wedding.
When McCulloch, a former managing editor of the Paris Review and editorial director of Tin House Books, married for the first time, the ceremony took place at her parents’ beachfront home in the East Hamptons. The house, writes the author, “had a shabby grandeur to it that time forgot.” This run-down elegance also characterized the Hamptons, which in 1983 was “known mainly for artists and potato fields and the fishermen who made their living trawling off Montauk Point.” A few days before the wedding, McCulloch’s father suffered a massive stroke, transforming a celebration into a crisis that revealed the cracked foundations undergirding the family. Not long before the ceremony, her affected and controlling mother, Patricia, had forced her lifelong alcoholic father, John, to stop drinking. Cessation sent John's body into withdrawal shock and caused his stroke. Yet despite the many problems they had with each other, both lived their lives as though their marriage and family were as happy as they were perfect. The author's own choice of husband disappointed Patricia, who had expected McCulloch to marry a “Social Register” man rather than Dean, “the boy next door.” Shortly after the wedding and before McCulloch and her husband could even open wedding presents, John died. At first, Dean’s wholesomely all-American family seemed to offer a haven to the author. But three years after the wedding, Dean’s father told the family at a Christmastime gathering that he had fallen in love with another woman and eventually left to go live with her. Meanwhile, the author and her husband grew increasingly apart. By the fifth year of their marriage, “all we had in common was the desire not to hurt one another’s feelings.” McCulloch provides an honest and sensitive portrayal of family dysfunction as well as an evocation of a dying world of old-money wealth and privilege.
A poignantly intimate memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-223475-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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