A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.
In this memoir, a mother recalls a two-year struggle to retrieve her abducted children from her ex-husband overseas.
In mid-March 1994, Meredith (When Push Comes to Shove, 2015, etc.) writes, her former spouse kidnapped their two young daughters from Alaska and took them to his native country of Greece. Over the next two years, she tried to locate the girls and bring them back to her Alaska home, all while navigating a bureaucratic and legal labyrinth in a foreign culture. This book is a remarkably eloquent and harrowing account of a journey that would tax any parent. “Get ready for the fight of your life, kid,” her boss at a battered women’s shelter warned her. “There won’t be a quick fix for this one.” Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) navigated similar territory, but Meredith brings a unique perspective to her story, shaped by her own childhood. She says that her mother—who “fancied herself a Hollywood starlet waiting to be discovered”—abandoned her when she was 13. “She unloaded her stress on the children before she began unloading the children themselves,” the author notes with typical bluntness. The author didn’t want her own daughter “growing up in a broken home like I did,” but her marriage ended in March 1990 after, she says, her husband tried to strangle her. She was awarded custody of their two girls but that didn’t prevent him from kidnapping them four years later, she writes. “Not even the electric chair or a lifetime in jail would keep me from blowing your brains out if you ever come close to the girls again,” she says that he told her after she made an initial, abortive trip to Greece to retrieve them. Meredith draws readers into her excruciating quest with her command of detail and language: the wife of one of her Greek lawyers is “inexplicably comforting to look at, like a human quilt,” and an American expatriate married to a Greek man lives in a home that “comes with all the amenities, including his mother and his childhood furnishings.” The author encounters one obstacle after another, including being arrested in Greece and then sued by her ex-husband for violating a Greek custody order. The book’s conclusion could hardly be a more resounding tribute to the human spirit.
A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-834-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2016
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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