Be forewarned: After you read this beautiful account of the small triumphs and not-so-small heartbreaks of foster care, you...
Harrison (Another Place at the Table, 2003) has opened her home to more than 100 foster children. In this memoir, she focuses on just one.
Foster parents know that, unless they are prepared to take a child on very short notice, they shouldn’t answer the phone late Friday afternoon. Seasoned foster mom Kathy Harrison is a little surprised to find herself not only accepting just such a last-minute placement, but choosing, from among the three children for whom her social worker was trying to find beds, the one who sounded the most challenging. At six, Daisy was taking an inordinate number of psychiatric medications, she didn’t talk much, and she refused to eat. She twirled in circles or flapped her hands like wings when anxious. But after several weeks with the Harrisons, Daisy, well, blossoms, emerging as a confident, sharp child. Eventually, she trusts Kathy enough to reveal details of heinous sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. Though Harrison takes pains to make clear that children at every socio-economic level are abused and neglected, she allows that one wouldn’t have expected Daisy’s family to land in the social-services net—Daisy’s grandmother is a well-heeled attorney, and her mom a flaky feng-shui devotee. Helping Daisy adjust to her new surroundings isn’t the only task on Harrison’s plate. Her daughter Karen, 13, has just been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, and another foster child, Jazzy, 8, is leaving the Harrison family to be adopted. This is good news, but Jazzy, who feels at home with the Harrisons, doesn’t want to go. Throughout, Harrison is endearingly matter-of-fact, even humble, about the hard but rewarding work to which she has been called.
Be forewarned: After you read this beautiful account of the small triumphs and not-so-small heartbreaks of foster care, you may find yourself scanning the web, trying to find out how to become a foster parent.Pub Date: April 6, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-465-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
SEEN & HEARD
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