A quirky narrative of artfully reconstructed memories.
Hart (Journalism/Univ. of Oregon; The Assault of Laughter, 2005) takes a second crack at recording her coming-of-age years in 1970s Southern California.
While the author’s first memoir focused on her relationship with her lesbian mother, this one deals with not only that issue but also with her conflicted feelings about being white. When her parent’s marriage dissolved and her mother moved out of their upper-middle-class suburban home, taking the author and siblings with her to Oxnard, a farming community north of the city, Hart was drawn to the color, warmth and especially the food of the large Hispanic families nearby. Chapters end with tongue-in-cheek recipes for making such dishes as tortillas, frito boats, chimichangas and chili. Her father soon won primary custody of the children, and the end-of-chapter recipes change to such delicacies as “WASP Milkshake” and “White Girl Cookies.” Hart viewed her cultural background as pallid, banal and insipid, and her awkward teenage attempts to make her way into more vibrant and tradition-laden cultures were often disconcerting and disappointing. As a misfit college freshman at UC-Santa Cruz, she hooked up with a Mexican-American janitor, believing that as his girlfriend she had finally achieved cultural legitimacy. For a time they lived together in a ramshackle trailer on his parents’ ranch, but the disparities in their backgrounds and in their expectations and ambitions doomed the relationship, apparently ending her search for an identity in the Hispanic world. The concluding chapter recounts a disastrous post-college trip to Spain with her mother in which the two women were totally out of synch with each other. The book is filled with detailed conversations and particulars of dress, mannerisms and facial expressions that give it the feeling of a novel.
A quirky narrative of artfully reconstructed memories.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58005-294-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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