Addie’s granddaughter, the author, is the real subject here, in a delicate exploration of growing up that gives weight to the land, to the economy, to the river, and most of all, of course, to complex family relationships. “An autobiography that begins with one’s birth begins too late,” says the author, because all the forces that will shape you, cosmic or human, are already in place at the moment of birth. So Settle (Choices, 1995; Charley Bland, 1989; etc.), winner of a National Book Award, lets her autobiography become a memoir of her maternal grandmother, Addie, and of the family homestead in West Virginia that was paid for by salt mines and coal mines. Addie came to the homestead by way of a first marriage that produced three daughters and three attempts at suicide on her part. She was rescued—at one point literally carried off when her husband tried to kill her—by the man who owned the homestead, the man who was her lover and by whom she was already pregnant with Settle’s mother. Having obtained a divorce, Addie took charge of her new home, of her beloved second husband, and of the little land that had not already been leased to the coal companies. There were family tragedies: Addie’s oldest daughter, Minnie, was a morphine addict, so adept that she could “drive the hypodermic through her dress . . . as she sat beating egg whites. . . .”; the husband let himself be run over by a train, although Addie would never concede suicide. Politics also becomes personal: Mother Jones, the almost mythical labor organizer, is a real person here, proselytizing the coal miners of the Kanawha Valley. Addie, at some risk, loaned her a field to hold her meeting. Addie, her children and grandchildren, her in-laws and outlaws (the paternal side of the family) are all aspects of the child, the adult, the novelist that Mary Lee Settle became. The author captures them in a kind of chorus of life and death that has now set her free.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57003-284-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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