An enormously appealing memoir despite a slow start.
Duncombe (Trailing, 2012), an expat therapist who specializes in uprooted families, writes about her own family’s transition from Paris to Lyon, France.
This exceedingly readable memoir begins on a somewhat sour note. After eight years in Paris, the author’s husband, Tano, took a job in the smaller city of Lyon, insisting that he’d had “enough of the big city life. Enough of the cost of living. Enough of our family of four crammed into a 635-square-feet-apartment.” Duncombe was a sort of professional expat herself due to her father’s career with the U.S. Foreign Service, so she was more suited to the nomadic life than most. She even worked as a therapist, advising families on how to handle just the sort of transition she now faced. But giving advice is often easier than living it. Lyon, she says, was “a French San Diego….I have never seen so many people in spandex.” Things began to look up, though, when she found an enormous—and enormously charming—apartment in a shamelessly expensive neighborhood. One major drawback: the titular five flights of stairs—a vertigo-inducing climb, with or without groceries. Still, once Duncombe focuses on her creation of a new life, her writing undergoes a remarkable transformation. Pre-move, her tone comes off as complaining, as Tano wants to live in the suburbs, and she wants to live in town: “Without French driver’s licenses we cannot get a car, and without a car there is no way we can live in the rural suburbs, and this suits me just fine,” she notes. But with Paris in the rearview mirror (mostly), her observations become much sharper and her tone a lot livelier. She’s also funny; in a scene at her little boy’s after-school playgroup, for example, she dubs a triumvirate of sleek French mothers/mistresses “The Charlie’s Angels.” Her impression of another group, “the Louis Vuitton plastic surgery trio,” is less favorable: “frail ankles and age-spotted hands give them away as much older women.” Although this book may get off to a stumbling start, patient readers will find this a smart story for smart women (and men).
An enormously appealing memoir despite a slow start.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5234-7226-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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