In a weighty account, kitchen sink included, a proper, upper- class mother visits her estranged daughter in India and during their perambulations through the countryside achieve a better, if not complete, appreciation for each other's viewpoint. Nothing escapes the descriptive attack of Hadley, a blue- blooded, experienced magazine and travel writer, as she and daughter Veronica (a.k.a. Elsa Cloud) travel through the subcontinent in class, visiting the palaces of maharajahs, touring game preserves, participating in some wild Hindu festivals, and finally reaching Veronica's Buddhist redoubt near the home of the Dalai Lama. Keen of eye and ear, Hadley gives a detailed disquisition on India's flora and fauna, history, geography, religions, and foods as well as individual portraits of Indian holy men, intellectuals, and ordinary folk—all of which can leave a reader gasping under its magnitude. But India's spiritualism, its conjoining of asceticism and erotica, its architecture and landscape, principally form the stage for Hadley's quest to come to terms with her 25-year-old daughter's rebellion—which one suspects is not entirely deep-seated—against her materially based upbringing—as well as Hadley's fixations on her own relationship with her frigid mother. Hadley avoids confrontations with Veronica, while confiding her anxieties and complaints to her reader: She wonders whether she has repeated her mother's mistakes in raising Veronica; she questions whether Veronica has inherited the emotional coldness of her own mother. In between, Hadley delivers flashbacks of a privileged if often loveless childhood, her failed teenage marriage, and her unusually adventurous life with Veronica's father, a dreamy geologist who eventually abandoned the family. All of this, including her therapist's Jungian admonitions, are connected in some way; but even as the reader sometimes wishes Hadley's writings were less fevered, one must admire her honesty and industriousness in producing a rather monumental work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-885983-16-6
Page Count: 625
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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.
