The mesmerizing tale of a young Englishwoman's strange life in the backward world of a remote South American sugar plantation during the early 1970s. When St. Aubin de Teran was a mere schoolgirl of 16, she met a political exile from Venezuela, Jaime de Ter·n, a man in his late 30es. He pursued her doggedly and, she agreed to marry him when she was 17. They spent the next three years traveling around Europe with some of his fellow exiles (but without much money). Jaime was an odd character, given to extended bouts of strange behavior, but the ever-flexible teenager made nothing of it. When an amnesty made it possible for him to return home to the family estate—a sugar cane plantation the Andes—he and his child-bride moved there. St. Aubin de Ter·n tells of her years (1971-79) on the feudal Ter·n estate with a small and vulnerable daughter, a fiercely loyal pet buzzard, and a homicidally insane husband. He is the last scion of an ancient (and inbred) aristocratic clan. Managment of the estate fell largely on her inexperienced shoulders. The many families who live in near-servitude on the plantation are impoverished and suffer from terrible diseases in addition to all manner of self-inflicted misfortune. Indeed, the author has enough misfortunes of her own, but they dont get the better of her. This remarkable book is striking for its cannily articulate, vivid, yet always understated prose style. It grips the reader from beginning to end. St. Aubin de Ter·n writes with the dispassionate eye of a cultural anthropologist and the story-telling craftsmanship of the novelist she is (Nocturne, 1993, etc.). One only wishes for more photos than the 19 she supplies. There is no picture of the buzzard, for example, one of the tale's most interesting figures. A memoir of conspicuously powerful narrative force, never sentimental or self-indulgent.
Pub Date: April 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-81634-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
