A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.
Following the untimely death of his adopted African-American son, a father seeks posthumous reconciliation in this affecting collection of personal letters by Gough.
Jeff and his fraternal twin, Shelia, were 7 years old when they were adopted. The author and his wife, Judy, spotted the photographs of “two black kids available for adoption” in the local newspaper. At the end of the 1960s, attitudes toward racial integration in America were changing, marked by the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, yet racial tensions remained high in many states. The author, who describes himself as living a “white Anglo-Saxon lifestyle,” was all too aware of having spent the summer of 1965 working as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. Each of the letters in this book is addressed to deceased Jeff, gently explaining the background to his adoption into a white family. Jeff is described as a charismatic yet defiant child; his actions, in part, related to him being physically and emotionally abused during the first six years of his life. He remained naturally defensive, twisting away from his adoptive father’s embrace. As he grew older, he began to steal, beginning with what seemed an innocuous piggy bank heist but in later years turning into car burglaries, joyriding, and petty theft. Evidently beyond his father’s physical control and emotional guidance, Jeff’s life rapidly spiraled downward, and as a young man he spent time between the YMCA and jail, heading toward a tragic end. The author’s stylistic approach is admirably succinct and frank: “you came into our family as a child who had learned to take because nothing was given.” The book may fail to fully reflect the emotional viewpoints of Jeff’s sister or his adoptive siblings, who remain muted throughout, yet that’s excusable given how this is essentially a monologue from father to son. While more broadly exploring the bonds and strains of interracial adoptive parenthood, the brave, cathartic writing also offers a window to street-level racial tensions during the civil rights movement.
A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5033-0437-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
