A memoir that crafts a neatly resolved narrative though it doesn’t always dive as deeply as it could have.
Reinhart’s debut memoir recounts her childhood and early adulthood as she worked toward stability and self-realization.
The author was born in 1969 near Oakland, California, and she and her family moved into the city itself soon afterward. Reinhart had to quickly adjust to life in the “Holy Hill” neighborhood; at school, Reinhart says, she learned “from one of the toughest girls” there to stick up for herself and to never be a “mark.” As one of the few white kids at her school, she struggled to find a way into the social scene, she says. Although her parents weren’t religious, she joined a local community of arch-conservative Apostolic Pentecostals. Through the church, she befriended 19-year-old Lindsay, who gave her horseback-riding lessons; she also taught Reinhart how to cook and clean in a more laid-back way than her own fastidious mother did. The author eventually took exception to her church’s treatment of women, and by junior high, she’d delved further into her school’s party scene and began going on dates—sometimes with older men in their 20s. Reinhart also says that she became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol. After finishing high school, she studied to become a hairstylist and was successful in her career before an unexpected pregnancy at the age of 20 changed her life forever. Overall, Reinhart writes in a conversational tone, as if she’s telling a juicy story to a good friend. This voice makes her memoir an easy read even when the subject matter takes darker turns. Her portrayal of her relationship with her mother is deeply detailed although her connections with her sister and father are less defined. Reinhart ends her story tidily with a description of how she came to “manifest” her goals and bring them to fruition. However, she tells more about this transformation than she shows, which makes the overall arc somewhat unsatisfying; for instance, when she describes her relationship with her future husband, Hunter, she stuffs their scenes of conflict with explanation rather than letting readers draw their own conclusions.
A memoir that crafts a neatly resolved narrative though it doesn’t always dive as deeply as it could have.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-383-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
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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