A sometimes-slow tale of remarkable perseverance and devotion that elicits anger and admiration.
Written by Patti Rust in the late 1970s, and recently edited and rewritten by her daughter-in-law, Karilyn Rust, this debut memoir recounts the passionate love story of two damaged souls—one emotionally crippled by circumstance, the other plagued by mental illness.
In October 1919, Patti, 4 years old, was sent to live with the wealthy O’Neill family in Rome, Georgia. Her poverty-stricken, widowed mother had been cajoled into allowing the O’Neills to raise Joy as their own daughter. They changed her name to Patti and instructed her never to admit that she was adopted. Her new father was kind, but Rosa O’Neill was an unloving tyrant, cruel in words and deeds. Patti was given all the upper-class advantages, but Rosa always reminded her that she came from “poor white trash.” During the summer of her freshman year in college, Patti met Harry Rust, from Birmingham, Alabama, and it was as if they instantly completed one another. Two years of inconsistent courtship led to their wedding in 1936. What wasn’t understood at the time was that Harry suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. He was brilliantly creative and adored Patti but was given to fits of despair, hypochondria, selfishness, hours of weeping, and, in later years, violent rages. Patti stood by him through 24 years of marriage until his death at 47, most likely by suicide. The smoothly flowing narrative, as revised by Karilyn to read “more like a novel,” contains extensive dialogue that probably reflects tone and content rather than actual duplication of conversations. Patti’s anger toward Rosa and compassion for Harry ring clear with authentic feeling. Long passages devoted to Harry’s “episodes” and detailed descriptions of every aspect of the ever expanding house they built, the meals served, and the clothing worn grow tedious, but they do offer a visceral image of a privileged, albeit dysfunctional, life in the mid-20th-century deep South. There is also a scathing indictment of the woefully inadequate psychiatric treatment Harry received.
A sometimes-slow tale of remarkable perseverance and devotion that elicits anger and admiration.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-365-75649-8
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
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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