Braestrup delivers another appealing, tenderhearted memoir braiding faith and family.
An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister comes to terms with a son joining the Marines.
Maine Warden Service chaplain Braestrup (Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir, 2010, etc.) embraced a faith-based livelihood after her first husband, a state trooper, tragically perished in a car accident. With affable flourishes and a healthy sense of self-deprecating humor, the author brings her eldest son, Zachary, into vivid focus. After her husband’s sudden death, Braestrup was compelled to embark on a ministry career that led her to a law enforcement chaplaincy and countrywide speaking engagements on grief, trauma, and bereavement. Her anecdotes are innocuously entertaining in their brevity, frankness, and sunny delivery: the gushed confessions from total strangers who see her clergy collar; her unflinchingly compassionate delivery of spiritual care at a “woodland calamity”; memories of her father, who served in the Marine Corps and fought in Korea; and the pleasures of mothering (and stepmothering) six children after remarrying. Perhaps most affecting is the sudden avalanche of worry brought on by the “salesman’s enthusiasm” of the recruiter who visited Zach after a school career day. As “the first to launch from the familial nest,” her eldest child put the squeeze on her heart when he decided to enlist in the Marines. As parents’ memories often do, Braestrup’s narrative wanders down Memory Lane often, as she shares many of Zach’s firsts, filled with foibles and amazing acts of bravery and solidarity (at 11, he sewed a rainbow patch on his book bag to oppose anti-gay classmates). While immensely proud of her oldest, the author naturally fretted over his safety. “I was afraid he would be changed into a monster and the change would be forever,” she writes. Sensitive and wholesomely charming, the book is refreshingly free of preachy proselytization and instead addresses the bittersweetness of parenthood and perennial nurturing.
Braestrup delivers another appealing, tenderhearted memoir braiding faith and family.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-37378-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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