As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s...
A daughter recounts a legacy of violence in this debut memoir.
One October, Jose Venegas prepared for his annual trip from Chicago, where he lived with his wife and children, to his native Mexico. As usual, he took clothing and household goods for his parents and extended family. But this time, he also bought a bulletproof vest and packed into steel trunks all the guns he had stored in the house. “Your father is never coming back,” his wife announced a few days later. For nearly 15 years, Venegas had no contact with her father, who, she learned, had killed her uncle and attempted to murder many other men. He was, she believed, violent, volatile and a coward for leaving his family unprotected. Furious with her father, she felt alienated from her mother, an evangelical Christian with no aspirations for her daughter’s future. When Venegas said she wanted to go to college, her mother told her to apply instead for a job as a cashier at Kmart: “You could drop out of school, make some good money,” she said. The author, however, followed her dream, enrolling as an economics major at the University of Illinois and studying abroad in Spain. Haunted by a past she did not understand, she gave in to her boyfriend’s urging to reconnect with her father. That reunion led to regular visits, during which she discovered how deeply imbedded he was in a culture of violence and retribution. At age 10, he blew the head off a rattlesnake with his father’s rifle; soon after, his mother pressed a knife into his hands, urging him to retaliate against a bully; two years later, she gave him a gun to use for revenge. Killing, he learned, was expected of a man, and drinking exacerbated his violence.
As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s love, beset by regrets and seared by brutality.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-11731-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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