Lyrical and heartfelt.
An essayist writes about how she tried to flee an oppressive home life only to find herself face to face with the demons she thought she had left behind.
Piety reigned supreme in Chaudhuri’s childhood home. Joy “was like a glimmer of sunshine that slip[ped] in through the cracks…but never quite settle[d],” and shame lurked in every corner. The author struggled to reconcile her family’s faith with her own emerging beliefs and desires. She learned about sexuality covertly, through the pornographic pictures a neighbor boy showed her and the furtive caresses she exchanged with a servant girl—and later, adolescent males equally hungry for sensual experience. At the same time, Chaudhuri bore witness to the soul-crushing frustrations of her parents. A promising singer, her mother found her dreams thwarted by marriage and teachers bent on breaking her spirit. Her father, a one-time top executive, fell from grace and never again regained his former professional status. Eager to step out of the shadows that religion, her parents’ failures and demands for academic perfection cast upon her, Chaudhuri applied to college in the United States. When she left Bangladesh to attend university in Massachusetts, she vowed never to “get attached to the idea of home,” as had her parents, opting instead for the freedom of a life that would “constantly keep her on the move.” She fell in love with Yameen, a fellow Muslim expatriate born in Tanzania. Rather than find comfort in each other and their mutual alienation, both descended into an isolated world defined by half-truths, infidelity, alcohol and abuse. An affair with a deeply religious American man broke the hold both Yameen and the past had over Chaudhuri. Relieved of the twin burdens of shame and grief, she learned to let go of self-punishing behaviors and embrace imperfection—in herself, her parents and her own tangled history—with love.
Lyrical and heartfelt.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-622-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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