This courageous, empowering survival story brings the phrase “battered woman” into terrifying focus.
Washington Post columnist Steiner (editor: Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, 2006) shares the painful story of her abusive marriage.
With a degree from Harvard, a job at Seventeen and an apartment in Manhattan, 22-year-old Steiner was ready to start her life anew after overcoming her substance-abuse problems from her teen years. When she met handsome, charming Conor, a 31-year-old investment banker, she fell hard. On a trip home to an affluent Washington, D.C., suburb to meet her divorcing parents, Conor picked a fight, furious that Steiner grew up in such a “perfect” place while he was beaten by his stepfather in working-class Boston. Although she was wary of his temper, Steiner was too in love and too sympathetic about Conor’s past to be anything but relieved when they made up days later. When he half-choked her during sex and whispered “I own you,” she was frightened but chalked it up to kinkiness. Days before their wedding, Conor slapped her when she swore at their malfunctioning laptop, but Steiner’s fear and doubts were silenced by the avalanche of seemingly irreversible wedding preparations. In steady, intimate prose punctuated by surprising, refreshing streaks of humor, the author describes how the violence escalated, including an incident in which Conor pressed a gun to her temple. Especially enlightening is Steiner’s discussion with a professor whose focus is abusive men. After a summer apart for business-school internships, Conor kept his promise not to hit her again—until one violent night when he smashed a picture frame over her head, kicked her in the ribs and strangled her until she lost consciousness. Steiner finally left, even though “leaving meant abandoning…the best part of me, that part that was not afraid to love unconditionally.”
This courageous, empowering survival story brings the phrase “battered woman” into terrifying focus.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37745-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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