An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.
Rutkin’s debut memoir recalls her yearlong separation from her husband, a cop, as he was imprisoned for stealing money from drug dealers.
In 1976, the author’s new husband, Matthew Smith, was indicted on charges of grand larceny—just four days into their honeymoon. After a drug bust the previous year, five officers had stolen $30,000 in cash from the suspects; Smith’s share of the take had been $3,000. (“They weren’t doing anything different than anyone else on the job,” he later told Rutkin for this book.) Smith refused to turn state’s evidence against other cops, and beginning in September 1977, he served 366 days in prison. Rutkin was understandably angry, as well as sad, lonely, and worried; she also had financial troubles, including bankruptcy, to handle. But she was determined to bolster her husband through his depression, isolation, shame, and fear. The couple wrote to each other nearly every day in letters filled “with our love and longing, with day-to-day, hour-to-hour chronologies of our comings and goings.” Over time, Rutkin learned to address her own emotional needs and detach when cheering up her husband became exhausting. At length, the couple resumed a normal life after his release in 1978, and they’re still married today. Although readers may not have much sympathy for Smith at first, his letters and Rutkin’s writing provide a balanced view of events. Extracts from Smith’s well-written letters give readers vivid glimpses of prison life—jobs, friendships, his attempts to better his placement—as well as of his own feelings; they portray a sensitive, intelligent man with a deep need for belonging. Rutkin’s contemporary comments strengthen the memoir by adding nuance to the story told in the letters: “I choke on the dreams that flit through them…I get dizzy with these pages and pages of pie-in-the-sky affirmations.” But although the book is insightful, some readers may not find the separation to be as significant as Rutkin does, due to its relative brevity.
An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.Pub Date: May 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4685-3921-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
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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