Lauren’s writing is brave and honest, and she calls out hypocrisy wherever she sees it and shines a light on the challenges...
Exploring how we see identity through the process of adoption.
Readers of Lauren’s Some Girls (2010) need no introduction to bring them up to speed for her second memoir. In her first book, she chronicled how, at age 18, she turned to stripping and prostitution when her efforts at acting weren’t moving forward. She learned of a unique audition, and that led to a “role” in the harem of a Brunei prince. The end of that book provided a tidy wrap-up of where she’d landed—married to the bass player from Weezer and the adoptive mother of a boy from Ethiopia—that suggested, perhaps inadvertently, smooth sailing from there forward. Not so, as we find in this second memoir, which rewinds the story a bit to pick up before her marriage and tell how their relationship started, their early time together, and their efforts to conceive a child. Lauren’s writing takes the shine off of the happily-ever-after of conceiving. She writes of feeling convinced, over and over, that each month was going to be “the one,” only to sink deeper into disappointment. She also found herself filled with questions about her own fitness to serve the roles through which she came to identify herself: a wife, a mother, a daughter. She recalls trying to cover her tattoos, stop swearing, and maintain an endlessly cheerful attitude, expecting herself to be judged during the adoption process, only to uncover her own prejudices. The author also recounts the challenges of adopting a child who has suffered significant trauma, the family shunning that came as a result of her previous memoir, and the enormous struggle to get help for their son.
Lauren’s writing is brave and honest, and she calls out hypocrisy wherever she sees it and shines a light on the challenges faced during the adoption process.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-14-218163-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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 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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