Food (in all its polymorphous varieties, kosher and not), designer clothes, their mother Edith's silverware, but especially, especially, Edith's loving attention—these are the cravings of Felman and her sisters in this rather offputting memoir. The lives of Felman (Hot Chicken Wings, not reviewed) and her older sisters, Judy and Jan, were regulated in every way by a perfectionist mother whose nostrums for life included the importance of playing bridge and setting a perfect table. Her house immaculate, she placed a sign in the bathroom admonishing her daughters, ``If you sprinkle when you tinkle, then please be neat and wipe the seat.'' But Edith was always busy, teaching Hebrew school, going to Hadassah meetings, being the perfect homemaker. Too busy, along with father Marvin, who had his parking lot to maintain, to notice that Judy was shoplifting and becoming anorexic. So busy that 12-year-old Jyl intentionally hyperventilated one day to place herself in the hospital so she could receive Edith's undivided attention. Even after their mother's death from Parkinson's disease, this Edith-craving causes bitter jealousy among her daughters, who vie to inherit her belongings. The memoir opens with this sibling rivalry, and one immediately conceives a dislike for these three immature women. Felman seems locked in a love-hate relationship with her mother, a need to both identify with and separate herself from Edith. But it is the unresolved rage that predominates in this book, which is more an outpouring than an exploration. Trying to lend greater significance to her family's pathology, Felman constantly drags in Jewish history: ``Judy was the messianic hope after the Holocaust. . . . It was a lot of pressure.'' This explains her anorexia? And Felman's habit of writing in sentence fragments (``When she was born. She was the first. Of everything'') becomes an added irritant. Felman is so full of sympathy for herself, that readers will have no need to add their own.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1997
ISBN: 0-8070-7074-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
