An honest, compassionate memoir about shaking off personal demons and finding “solace…liberation [and] joy.”
An account of the author’s obsession with a female Rhodes scholar who killed herself at 27.
In 1981, Teich (co-author: Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World, 2001) was a senior at Yale. She was also among a tiny minority of women vying for a Rhodes scholarship, which had only just begun to be open to female applicants. Uncertain as she felt about herself as “a writer, a loner, a dancer, a Jew,” the author was nevertheless among those selected to attend Oxford for two years of postgraduate work. The scholarship afforded her many elite academic—and later, career—opportunities. Yet Teich never felt entirely comfortable with the idea that she would forever be identified with a born-for-success group of individuals educated to “fight the world’s fight.” Privately, she saw herself as a “toxic” woman with a perverse need for mistreatment from men and a tainted past that included a sexually abusive relationship with a dance teacher. Now a happily married woman with two children, Teich suddenly developed a morbid fixation with her daughter's personal safety. She also came across an obituary for another former Rhodes scholar who had died under tragic circumstances. Lacey Cooper-Reynolds was a golden girl hailed as “brilliant…radiant [and] beguiling,” but she committed suicide just as her life and career had begun to bloom. Fascinated by the young woman's story, Teich researched her background and history relentlessly. Like the author, Cooper-Reynolds was also an outsider, but one whose difference came of a modest background worlds apart from the high-society glamour of Oxford. As Teich pondered the pressures her Rhodes “sister” had faced, she had to confront her own painful past as well as the fears that now threatened to destroy the family she had struggled to create. Teich’s book is not just compelling for the way it plumbs the psyche of an outwardly driven and ambitious woman; it is also provocative in its questioning of what female success really means.
An honest, compassionate memoir about shaking off personal demons and finding “solace…liberation [and] joy.”Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-569-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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