A lost childhood reclaimed in profound triumph, and with the promise of a sequel to match.
A searing, soaring memoir of one girl’s complicated and almost unbelievable childhood.
Jennifer Lauck’s mother died in the fall of 1970, leaving Jennifer’s father to look after her and her brother B.J. on his own. With dizzying speed, shock after shock followed this initial tragedy. Out of frustration, B.J. disclosed the secret of Jennifer’s adoption, which her father confirmed. Soon he introduced his two children to Deb, the materialistic, impractical woman he had apparently been seeing since before his wife’s death; eventually he and Deb (who had three children from an earlier marriage) wed. An emotional tug-of-war ensued between the Lauck children and their surrogate mother, and, during her stay at a summer camp, Jennifer was sexually molested by one of the male counselors. Not long afterward, her father suffered a fatal cardiac arrest, leaving Deb in charge of all five kids. Guided by the High Early Seventies idealism of the commune-like Freedom Church, Deb and the kids moved to northern California in a brief attempt at living off the land near Stanford University, before returning south in defeat. On the brink of losing total control, Deb enrolled Jennifer, who was 11, in a program sponsored by her “church” that allowed her to live under the supervision of a married couple near downtown Los Angeles; she was expected to work for her room and board there, while simultaneously seeing herself through school. The story ends with rescue: some Lauck relatives from Nevada who happened to be visiting Los Angeles looked up the kids, discovered their plight, and claimed custody. This hairpin-curve existence is narrated entirely from a young girl’s viewpoint, and Lauck’s literary achievements—voice, characterization, pacing—are as extraordinary as those of Frank McCourt and Dave Eggers, if not more so.
A lost childhood reclaimed in profound triumph, and with the promise of a sequel to match.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-04255-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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