Fits snugly on the burgeoning stacks of immigrant and survivor memoirs, but given the sheer volume of such personal...
Lac chronicles the harrowing journey from war-torn Vietnam to adulthood.
Born in 1967 in a small town near Saigon, the author was five months old when the Tet Offensive began. Her mother, a seamstress, was forced to flee with Lac and her younger sister Hanh. She saw her father only on his annual leave from the South Vietnamese army, when he was usually drunk and arguing with her mother. He was killed in 1975, and Hanh died soon after. In 1978, the author’s mother used their savings to purchase two spots on a small fishing boat that would smuggle them out of the country. It foundered off the coast of Malaysia, killing 200 of the 350 refugees crammed aboard, but Lac and her mother miraculously survived. After months in a prison-like refugee camp, they were granted U.S. residency and safely made it to California. Adjusting to America was difficult; they kept moving based on the whereabouts of her mother’s current boyfriend, and Lac resented it. She managed to graduate from high school in 1986 and became a U.S. citizen that same year. “Little by little,” she writes, “I had started to become a whole new person…someone who was not quite Vietnamese, not quite American, never completely comfortable or happy, and never sure why.” This self-pitying tone permeates the author’s strife-laden account of a disastrous marriage that produced two sons and a ten-year stay in Paris before she returned to the United States in 2006. She seems to have been yanked from land to land, domicile to domicile, by her mother, her husband and fate. Much of the memoir is told from a victim’s perspective, which gives a hollow ring to Lac’s attempt to trumpet her transformation from a frightened, withdrawn child to an autonomous autobiographer.
Fits snugly on the burgeoning stacks of immigrant and survivor memoirs, but given the sheer volume of such personal nonfiction, having lived to tell isn’t enough; you need to have something to say beyond complaints.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3114-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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