An unremarkable double memoir.
Side-by-side versions of an evolving parent-child relationship whose ups and downs are recounted in overstatement and clichés.
First-time authors Joan, who works in the children’s entertainment business, and daughter Maddy, 22 but still growing up, give often conflicting versions of the same events. Both accounts read as though they were being told aloud to a friend. Joan’s style is effusive and her vocabulary limited; she describes her daughter as “incredibly social” and some good friends as “absolutely hilarious.” Maddy is more matter-of-fact, but just what the facts are depends on who’s telling the story. There are two versions of a grocery store candy-stealing episode when Maddy was eight (not long after her parents divorced), of her learning problems in elementary school and of a disturbing incident that began when Joan ejected Maddy and some other misbehaving children from her car, obliging them to find their way home across the city. Teenaged Maddy sabotaged her mother’s relationship with a man identified only as “Bike Guy,” and then with another, “Tree Guy.” Her educational difficulties continued, but eventually she graduated from Taddle Creek, an alternative high school with 20 students run by a man named Harvey Rainbow. More serious problems arose when Maddy was 19 and learned that the man she was dating was HIV-positive and had infected several other girls. While that episode had a happy ending, major troubles lay ahead. Assuming that her mothering days were coming to an end, Joan decided to leave Canada for southern California to start a new life alone. When her 20-year-old daughter unexpectedly came along, she found herself back in mothering mode, as Maddy made a mess of her life with drinking and drugs. Their tale ends with Joan adoring and admiring her “simply amazing” daughter and with Maddy admitting her drug use and asserting her love for her mother.
An unremarkable double memoir.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1839-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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