One of those rare memoirs that both teach and make us laugh.
A journalist and ex-stripper marries a career Army officer.
After a chance meeting and whirlwind romance, Burana (Try, 2006, etc.) married Mike, a major in the U.S. Army. Though they were an odd couple—a former exotic dancer who wrote a bestselling book about her adventures (Strip City, 2001) and an all-American hero who devoted his life to the military—Burana willingly joined the sisterhood of women whose husbands serve their country in uniform. She learned what this meant when Mike was deployed to the Middle East as the Iraq War began. She coped with the fear and loneliness that accompany having a loved one in harm’s way. She was awed, and intimidated, by the way other military wives kept home and hearth together. She was confused when Mike returned from duty different. On to West Point, whose arcane rituals and rules, both written and unwritten, Burana describes in hilarious detail. Despite her unorthodox—and what she feared some would see as sordid—past, she found peace among the soldiers and spouses of West Point. Until, following her father’s death, depression hit her like a guided missile. Then the marriage that had sustained her began to suffocate her; the life of an Army spouse that had challenged and bemused, now terrified; and all she wanted was a way out. She left Mike and embarked on a battle to understand the posttraumatic stress that afflicted her and the memories of childhood abuse at the hands of a babysitter that haunted her. Mike learned he could not fix Burana, as was his Army can-do inclination, but could only love her. After many struggles, achingly delineated in beautiful prose, they reconciled and resumed their life at the Academy. Moved by the kindness and understanding other Army wives showed her, Burana determined to repay their kindness. How she did so was appropriately outrageous—and too funny an ending to give away.
One of those rare memoirs that both teach and make us laugh.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60286-083-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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