A memoir that ably addresses the challenges of meeting one’s personal needs while also serving humanitarian causes.
An idealistic, driven woman comes to terms with the realities of life in the global nonprofit sector.
In this debut, Bergman combines memoir with an analysis of the shortcomings of contemporary humanitarian relief organizations. The author, a pastor’s daughter in a family with a genuine ethos of service, began her career at 23 as an intern for an organization combating human trafficking in Cambodia. A few weeks later, the organization persuaded her to take over after the director’s sudden resignation, and she found herself in over her head, strapped for resources and stretched beyond her limits. She also failed to balance her own well-being with that of the people she served. Eventually, Bergman returned to her home in Canada, and underwent a long, personal process of self-examination, during which she grew to understand her own tendency to overextend herself. She then found a position in which she was able to do the work she was passionate about, but in a way that allowed her to thrive, rather than wither. The book touches on the structural problems of the nonprofit sector, from the salaries that keep professionals below the poverty line to the unrealistic expectations of donors. But Bergman focuses primarily on individual-level change, effectively using her own experiences as a way to show colleagues how to transition from offering aid to working for justice. Specifically, she urges them to see the populations that they serve as partners in changing the world, not mere objects of charity. As a result, Bergman’s idealism and passion for her cause are evident throughout the book. Occasionally, she indulges in overly dramatic prose (“From the lens of a small-town girl with sanguine expectations and fervent dreams”), and she sometimes chides people who fail to live up to her own standards. That said, the book clearly shows the author’s growing maturity over the course of the narrative.
A memoir that ably addresses the challenges of meeting one’s personal needs while also serving humanitarian causes.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1272-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 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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