An often charming memoir that intertwines personal and political histories.
Terzian’s (The Immigrant’s Daughter, 2005) second memoir explores the author’s global quest for independence.
The author was born into an Armenian family in Cairo in the 1930s; her parents were refugees who had fled Turkey in the ’20s. Although the Egyptian capital—at that time—offered ethnic and religious freedom, Terzian was constrained by the misogyny of both her conservative father and the broader community. Her stepmother frequently told her that as a woman, she was “somebody else’s property.” But after getting an English-language education at a Catholic high school, Terzian was determined to become a professional, college-educated woman—not just a traditional Armenian housewife. Her foray into employment and self-sufficiency coincided with an increasingly nationalist climate in Egypt in which Armenians and other ethnic minorities were often denied employment. She explained to a European colleague that she was an Armenian, not an Arabic-speaking Egyptian, despite having been born in Egypt: “If I were a kitten and born in an oven would you call me bread?” she said. Terzian found autonomy—and escape—through a position with the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Her career in international aid eventually led her to an expatriate life in Leopoldville, Congo, and Lomé, Togo, as well as to travel around a rapidly de-colonizing Africa and Cold War–era Western and Eastern Europe. A trip to visit her brother in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic illustrates the complex relationships of diaspora communities to their distant, mythologized homelands. Similarly, Terzian’s exploration of her expatriate status in Africa raises questions about what it means to have a home country—or even a home. The author does have a tendency to fall into the memoirist’s trap of over-documenting details of travel and work assignments, and the book might have made the same impact with a shorter page count. Still, the impact it does have is significant. Through her own story, Terzian articulates the ways in which patriarchy, culture, bureaucracy, and politics challenge but never fully derail an independent woman’s ambitions.
An often charming memoir that intertwines personal and political histories.Pub Date: June 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1311-9
Page Count: 402
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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