Despite its sheepish title, this is a commanding story not of a little girl lost, but of a woman-survivor who found herself and God in the painful aftermath of rape. Joseph enjoyed a storybook midwestern childhood until she was eight, when her loving father was killed in an engineering accident. His death threw the family in a quandary: Joseph’s mother sank into a decade-long battle with manic-depression, and Joseph and her three older brothers were left to fend for themselves. But by age 18, the young woman and her family had turned their lives around. Joseph became a model student and committed evangelical Christian, and was elected homecoming queen. Yet her world was about to be torn asunder once again. Shortly after her high school graduation and before her marriage, Joseph was raped at gunpoint in a mall parking lot by a serial rapist who had disabled her car. Joseph again employed her faith to emerge triumphant from this dark, painful time, encouraging the rapist’s other victims to file charges against him. After his conviction, she continued to struggle with trauma from the rape. Her memoir speaks honestly of her fears of sexual relations with her new husband and the deep anger she had welling inside her, ready to be unleashed on the people she loved the most. Joseph found healing by speaking out about her experience, first to local church groups and eventually to a national audience on the 700 Club. She also testified in another court case (her attacker attempted to rape another woman soon after his speedy parole), even finding the courage to present the rapist with a monogrammed, leather-bound Bible, which she prayed he would read. Moving and very frank, Joseph’s story will offer courage to many women, Christian and otherwise, who have been victims of rape. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49239-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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