An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.
One woman’s account of a harrowing attack in Berkeley, California, and its aftermath.
In 1984, Stefano (The Secret Games of Words, 2015) was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She had no luck joining a sorority, although she soon found an intriguing vocation: campus police aide, which involved “patrolling campus and surrounding neighborhoods, calling in suspicious activity.” She saw some unusual things in her time on the job, such as when she directed traffic (including stoned attendees on foot) at a Grateful Dead concert. One night, after leaving work, she was walking home alone and about to enter her apartment when she was threatened by a man with a knife. The attacker pinned her from behind, put his hand over her mouth, and pressed himself against her; he brought the knife up to her throat, but she managed to scream, and he fled. Although the author wasn’t physically injured, the book ably examines the many aftereffects of such an ordeal. She writes of a useless on-campus counseling session with a graduate student and of an unfriendly court system. Later in life, the author became a defense attorney and found herself arguing in court on behalf of people who were accused of crimes not unlike her attacker’s and grilling victims not unlike herself. The book clearly illustrates how life continues after one’s trauma and how strange, unexpected things can happen, as when the author saw her attacker in a grocery store later the same summer; stunned, she thought, “Attackers have to eat too.” The book loses some of its focus in later chapters; for example, regarding a return visit to Berkeley in 2014, she mentions some rather obvious ways that the city had changed (back in 1984, she notes, “No one blogged….There were no paninis, just sandwiches”). Still, later portions yield some potent material. What happened to the man with the knife? The answer, provided here, is chilling.
An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947856-95-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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