An uneven amalgam of memoir, storybook and picture album.
Kestin (Hammy, 2012) offers an illustrated memoir about her 1940s childhood.
Mary Kestin is “three fingers old” and living on a Montana farm as the story begins. Her parents soon move the family to Cheney, Wash., to complete their studies at a teachers’ college, and the book ends before Mary turns 5, when her parents receive their degrees. The tale is structured like a scrapbook, with each short chapter providing a snapshot of a minor event. Kestin’s early life on the farm includes recollections of gathering eggs, playing in fields and a minor farm accident. In Washington, mischievous Mary learns about city life in “A Rope Lesson.” In “‘M’ is for Mary,” the author vividly portrays her first writing experience (“I am the boss of the pencil!”); this epiphany is particularly noteworthy, as the author grows up to be an accomplished visual artist. The poems that end each chapter are less effective, as they often attempt to synthesize nuanced content into simplistic ditties, such as, “Mary has a red berry that makes her tongue cherry and her fingers scary.” Many anxieties slip into the stories, as well; for example, Mary doesn’t understand why her daddy doesn’t like to hug her; her grandmother clearly favors her sister; and she learns that her uncle fell asleep on the couch after drinking too much, which made her aunt mad. Such remembrances may be disquieting for younger readers. However, the author does effectively portray a child’s point of view, as when young Mary sits in the dirt: “I’m plowing a corn field with a table fork. My cow is an empty wooden spool of thread with a long string tied around the middle. I can pull my cow through my fields.” However, adults reading aloud may be stumped to decipher the line, “I want the isinglass egg that the sick boy received with the hole in it that showed a picture of Easter.”
An uneven amalgam of memoir, storybook and picture album.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492222149
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
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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