A visceral, darkly lyrical narrative that reads with the immediacy and rawness of an open wound.
A critically acclaimed poet’s account of her anguished descent into alcoholism and self-destruction.
When Groom (Five Kingdoms, 2009, etc.) gave birth to her one and only child at 19, she was already in the fierce clutches of alcohol dependency. Through a series of impressionistic, loosely chronological recollections, the author describes the early experimentations with drinking that evolved into full-blown addiction. Shy and socially awkward, the author—who took her first drink at 14 and had the first of many blackouts a year later—saw alcohol as liquid empowerment. It was, she recalls, a “potion that chang[ed] me, [made] me unafraid.” The greater her need for alcohol became, the more out of control her life became. Groom was increasingly drawn into questionable friendships, unhealthy relationships and life-threatening situations—extreme inebriation led her to be gang-raped and almost murdered. Her pregnancy was the eye in the increasingly violent storm of her life. But soon after she gave her son to her aunt and uncle, she became overwhelmed by a profound guilt that exacerbated a propensity toward self-mutilation. After one particularly gruesome cutting episode, Groom went to a rehabilitation center. As she recovered from alcoholism, she began to struggle with the trauma of losing her son, first to adoption, then to infantile leukemia. Wracked with self-hatred, she cycled in and out of school and moved from one low-paying job to another. Eventually, she gained the courage to embark on a two-decades-long journey to learn about her son and understand why he became ill. The language of this brooding and obsessive memoir is exquisitely compressed, yet beneath the taut imagery and diction are palpable, powerful surges of emotions.
A visceral, darkly lyrical narrative that reads with the immediacy and rawness of an open wound.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1668-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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