by Jennifer Lauck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2000
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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
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