A deeply felt, illuminating narrative, ranging from textbook historical accounts to personal reflections.
Chicago Review Press cofounder and former publisher Matthews traces her family history, uncovering an ordinary family’s place in, and effect on, history.
The author acknowledges that history is blurry and often imperfect, but she recounts the undisputed facts of her ancestry with a historian’s precision and fills in the blanks and the probables with a novelist’s imagination. Matthews charts an ordinary family, the Hammills, back centuries, as they made their way from southwest Scotland to Northern Ireland, then to the Chesapeake Bay region of North America, and finally on to the Pacific Northwest. In each setting and time period, the middle-class Hammills were literate and adaptable, comfortable with social structure and respected in their communities. As pioneers they seized opportunities presented to them. They were businessmen, clerks, lawyers, blacksmiths, wagon builders and lumber and flour millers. Matthews diligently follows them through historical and social events and shifts: mass migrations, religious persecutions, loss of ancestral lands, the American Revolution, slavery and the Civil War, westward expansion and economic depressions and booms. She illustrates how these major historical events affected the often-overlooked ordinary folk, and vice versa. As the family cyclically passes through the private dramas of births and deaths, weddings and funerals, hopes and disappointments, gains and losses, the author unassumingly taps into the natural rhythm of life and history, drawing numerous universal conclusions about family, ancestry and social interaction.
A deeply felt, illuminating narrative, ranging from textbook historical accounts to personal reflections.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55652-969-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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