Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more...
An affair holds the key to renewal, in an unsatisfying follow-up to Hannah’s Gift (2002).
Previously, the best-selling Housden told the harrowing story of her three-year-old daughter’s death. Now, in a sequel of sorts, she chronicles the next season in her own journey as mother, wife and woman. After Hannah died, Housden and her husband, Claude, had another child, but their marriage was on the rocks. Claude stopped wearing his wedding ring, and Housden suspected he’d had a fling while on a ten-day business trip. Craving time alone, she takes a retreat at a hermitage. “I could not shake the feeling,” she recalls, “that I was here to meet someone.” That someone is Roger, a dashing English author, with whom Housden has an affair. The affair “gently” opens her heart, “petal by petal,” and she returns home to tell Claude she wants a divorce. The two determine that he should take primary custody—hence the subtitle’s “different kind of mother.” Eventually, Housden marries Roger, and together they settle in as the non-custodial caregivers of her three children. Housden fears she’ll be judged—what kind of mother willingly gives up custody of her kids? But the memoir’s problems don’t stem from Housden’s presentation of her parenting. The few sections devoted to the mundanities of parenting are engaging. Indeed, one might wish Housden had spent more time detailing the nitty-gritty of non-custodial parenting. The trouble comes instead from Housden’s description of her affair and divorce. Her blasé acceptance of adultery, together with the suggestion that her affair was the transformative event that allowed her to discover her true self, rankles. The tone is self-congratulatory, and Housden’s efforts at profundity fall flat: “Safe. . . was someone else’s idea of a life, not mine.”
Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more bite—and self-criticism—will have to look elsewhere.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5416-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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