Although sections of the narrative read like a beach-book paperback, the luminous and hopeful ending—just barely—makes up...
An intriguing tale about the union of an unlikely mother and son.
Recknagel, the daughter of a late Louisiana oil tycoon, grew up to enjoy the comfortable, unfettered life of a trust-fund baby who had no more skeletons in her closets than most of the big-money folk she knew. In fact, as far as she was aware, Recknagel had only one—her mentally ill brother Jimmy, who was rejected by her father and hushed up as a family embarrassment. The wound of this childhood trauma had pretty much healed when Recknagel received a surprise visit from her 16-year-old nephew Jamie, Jimmy’s only child, who showed up her door one evening and asked leave to stay. Jimmy also exhibited symptoms of insanity, and his sudden appearance forced the author to confront some painful childhood recollections and to look at her troubled family in a new light. Her initial instinct was to turn Jamie away, but when she learned that he had been abused by both of his parents she decided to fight for custody of him instead. Recknagel is no Mother Teresa: her lubricious descriptions of the luxurious life she enjoyed before Jamie’s intrusion—her lovers, travels, and academic pursuits—are reminiscent of Danielle Steel, and her highly idealized view of the moral superiority of her own (hippy) generation grows tedious in short order. She also has a knack for melodrama: “Without my father, the family seemed to spin like an unpredictable tropical storm.” Still, her childhood flashbacks, which illuminate her complicated relationship with Jimmy and her parents, are rich with psychological insight, and readers who plow through the fluff will be pleased with the account of Recknagel’s transformation, induced by her new responsibilities as Jamie’s guardian.
Although sections of the narrative read like a beach-book paperback, the luminous and hopeful ending—just barely—makes up for it all.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26809-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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