One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.
A middle-aged woman who moved to Vermont to begin a new life pens an earnest, well-crafted celebration of the discovery of love, self-knowledge, and meaning.
Maloy’s well-intentioned account of a life transformed by love and faith is often an enervating exercise in conventional self-regard; the disappointments of her life are not so different from those of millions of men and women. This is not a dramatic tale of raging passions and horrible hurts but rather a familiar record, conventionally perceived, of the steady drip of the usual blows that leach hope from hearts. Maloy did not get on well with her religion-obsessed mother, and her father remained a distant figure. She married young, divorced, then married another unsuitable man and grew to hate her writing job. By the time she reached her 50s in Pittsburgh, her only joy was her young son Adam, her only hope the God her Quaker said her resided in each individual as a transforming light. But her life changed miraculously one Sunday in 1996 when, after attending a Quaker Meeting, she saw a house and realized she wanted to live there with Adam. Now her life suddenly had purpose. Confident of God’s presence in her life and the fitness of her past as prelude to this moment, she divorced her husband, bought the house, and then met Alan on the Internet. An e-mail courtship led to marriage and life in Vermont, a place Maloy had always considered her true home. Now at peace and braced by faith, she looks back from the perspective of the year beginning in the summer of 1998—as she, Alan, and Adam move into the house—on her past, her adjustments to her marriage, her Quaker faith and pacifist beliefs, and the unfolding seasons.
One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-145-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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