A tender, thoughtful portrait of four generations, prompting hopes that the author’s first full-length prose work won’t be...
Prizewinning poet Goodison (English/Univ. of Michigan; Goldengrove, 2006, etc.) pays tribute to her Jamaican heritage.
Starting in the mid-19th century, when her English great-grandfather, William Harvey, established a homestead next to the mighty river that would eventually bear his name, the author doesn’t so much trace events as animate the characters of her relatives who lived them. Readers seeking a detailed record of Jamaican history should look elsewhere, for Goodison unveils intimate worlds teeming with all the local flavor and poignancy of a Zora Neale Hurston novel. The five “fabulous Harvey girls” of her mother’s generation spark her particular interest, she writes, and “the place that had produced my mother’s people…was to shape my imagination for the rest of my life.” Describing the Harvey River, her family’s metaphorical life source, Goodison brings the memoir back to herself: “There are lost pearls and hopeless cases and the bones of runaway Africans down there as well as wedges of iron-hard brown soap which the women of Harvey River used to wash acres of clothes in this same river. As long as I swim in it, I will be borne to safety.” Yet the story isn’t really about her, except as the lucky offspring of people deeply, happily rooted in their family history. In a funny passage from the afterword to the U.S. edition, Goodison sends home a rapturous letter describing a breathtaking New York City sunset over the water, and her mother replies, “Who were the Hudsons that the river was named after?”
A tender, thoughtful portrait of four generations, prompting hopes that the author’s first full-length prose work won’t be her last.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-133755-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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