A brisk chronicle of a family’s (mis)adventures in Vietnam.
A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock.
Laid off from her job at the Los Angeles Times during the recession of 2008, travel writer Esterhammer realized that she and her self-employed husband could no longer afford their huge mortgage payments and car loans. There was nothing for them to do, she decided, but leave for someplace where they could live cheaply. They sold everything, rented their house, and, with their 8-year-old autistic son, moved to Vietnam. In a year, she calculated, they would have saved enough money by teaching English to return home with a comfortable financial cushion. The author portrays herself as cheerful, unflappable, and sometimes too clueless to be believed. She was astonished by the heat and humidity, for example. Completely mistaking the cost of housing, the family wound up in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s poorest districts, in a tiny, cockroach-infested house crammed into a noisy, dirty, densely populated neighborhood where daylong power outages are common. Esterhammer also underestimated the challenges of homeschooling their son, whose attention problems and constant talking proved overwhelming. Months after settling in, she “began to wonder why the loss of something as temporal as my material possessions and job had caused me to turn and run away so quickly.” She paints affectionate portraits of the kind neighbors who looked out for her, helping her to learn Vietnamese, teaching her how to shop and cook, and sharing with her stories of the extreme deprivation they suffered growing up; apparently, she knew little about the reality of postwar life. She was shocked both by their reminiscences and lack of “anger, resentment, or defeat.” Although she wants to convey an image of cool adventurousness, she admits that the real reason she left was not because of money but “to avoid my own embarrassment”; she preferred that friends think she was daring and impetuous than to “see what losers we were.”
A brisk chronicle of a family’s (mis)adventures in Vietnam.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938849-97-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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