Inspiring for family-history buffs but too staid for most general readers.
A sentimental history of family lore and furniture.
Following their mother’s death, former Philadelphia Inquirer Home & Design editor Tracy (Journalism/Washington and Lee Univ.) and her sister assumed the task of sifting through a household’s worth of antique furniture and collectibles. Faced with the dilemma of letting go of these long-treasured possessions, the author writes that “[w]e can, in fact, never be free of our stuff until we have dealt with the stories it carries.” Discussing her military family’s Canton china, the author begins with the story of her great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran who reared his family in varying remote Army outposts on the frontier. In 1900, his daughter Bess, Tracy’s grandmother, married a lieutenant and moved to Asia, where she was pregnant seven times. Sadly, due to tragedies like amoebic dysentery, only one of their children—the author’s mother—survived to adulthood. Interspersed with photos of family members and collectibles large and small—a sandalwood chest from China, a Spanish mission chest acquired in Manila, a so-called “George Washington chair,” where the first president may or may not have sat—the book is fueled by Tracy’s interest in unpacking old family lore by connecting the dots of her newly inherited possessions. These historical facts are relevant also because of the auction at which most of the items were sold. The author catalogues each piece, revealing multidimensional tales of how they came into her family’s possession and what each one represents (the dueling pistols, for instance, were once owned by Aaron Burr), and her newfound knowledge has the unsurprising effect of increasing her seller’s remorse. After the auction, Tracy furthered her thirst for information about her lineage by traveling to the Philippines.
Inspiring for family-history buffs but too staid for most general readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80726-4
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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