A memoir by Alexander (Nampally Road, 1990), tracing her life from childhood in India through youth and education in Africa and England to marriage and motherhood in Manhattan. Alexander's desire to overcome the ``torment'' of her ``multiple migrations'' in order to tell her story, however, is undercut by overwriting and an oceanic sentimentality. Beginning the story of her life with the story of this book's writing—an editor's pitch in an Upper West Side cafe; sleepless nights in the author's apartment spent assembling the ``fragments of a broken geography''—Alexander weaves back and forth between present and past, mixing metaphors and memories with abandon. ``I sit here writing, for I know that time does not come fluid and whole into my trembling hands. All that is here comes piecemeal, though sometimes the joints have fallen into place miraculously, as if the heavens had opened and mango trees fruited in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway.'' Born in 1951, the first of three daughters of a meteorologist, Alexander was raised in southern India before her father was transferred to the Sudan when she was five. From her summer visits back to her ancestral home, Alexander reconstructs her childhood idyll: There are her adoring and wise maternal grandfather in his garden of mango trees and cashews; her shrewd but affection old ayah (nanny); and the self-contained, genteel world of the joint family household. Forays into the social and political issues raised by postcolonialism and feminism occur throughout the text, but Alexander focuses on her own cultural identity crisis as metaphor for them. In her decision to wear a sari one day and a pair of jeans the next, she implicates the future of cultural difference and the integrity of the nation state. Alexander's view of herself as a sociopolitical microcosm seems far-fetched and self-absorbed; as a result, what might have been a revealing memoir remains a carelessly crafted reverie. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55861-058-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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