Stein’s compelling, sincere voice emerges full strength from this illuminating, soul-searching story of an emotionally...
A novelist and poet explores her role in a destructive relationship.
Jason looked like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, writes former New Yorker staff member Stein (The Fallback Plan, 2012, etc.), and she fell hard. That’s when the trouble began. In this memoir of loss and yearning, the author chronicles how she had moved on to a successful writing career and a new romance when she learned of Jason’s death in a motorcycle accident. Along with the news came painful memories and unanswered questions. She wondered why their lives were “so inseparably intertwined” and why she “went back to him so many times when his behavior should have kept me way.” They were young and at loose ends, and she had fallen in love with his passion, rebellious nature, and adventurous spirit, ignoring her sense that something was wrong. The warning signs were there: his cruel teasing, deceptions, manipulation, put-downs, and unstable behavior. Her mother, a psychologist, called out Jason’s “ ‘game’ as manipulative and controlling, a way to put [the author] in her place.” Stein never knew who was going to show up: the “charming, hardworking” Jason or the “surprisingly, memorably cruel” Jason. When she agreed to move with him away from family and friends to Albuquerque, the “Land of Enchantment,” it was emblematic of their cinematic dream world: “We had matching leather jackets for when we rode through the desert, two silhouettes against the night.” But the dream faded out, and a quagmire of obsessive love, recklessness, betrayal, and abuse faded in. Stein lost herself in the “heavily medicated fog” of depression, but she eventually garnered strength and courage reading about strong, independent women—e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe—and found her way out through writing. Some of the narrative is disturbing, but the author’s artful writing and intense—occasionally overly intense—self-examination and willingness to expose her vulnerabilities hold sway.
Stein’s compelling, sincere voice emerges full strength from this illuminating, soul-searching story of an emotionally crippling romance.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98267-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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