Frightening yet heartening—perfect movie material.
A young mother’s engrossing memoir of life below the poverty line, where home for her and three small children was a 1979 Subaru station wagon.
Kennedy, who first recounted her story on Salon.com, had been a student at American University and a suburban housewife outside Washington, DC, before she dropped out of the middle class. When her husband quit his white-collar job and moved to a rough cabin in the Maine woods, she followed him and gamely supported their family by working as a bartender. But after their daughter was attacked by a dog while her husband was babysitting, she packed the Subaru with three children under the age of six (one still in diapers) and fled. She drove south to the Maine coast, stopping in Stone Harbor, where she found work as a waitress. Unwilling to tell her parents of her plight, unable to get food stamps or subsidized housing, and unaware of the help she might have received from churches or other charitable organizations, Kennedy, then 24, managed on her own. She made the car their home, putting the youngsters to sleep in the back and taking the front seat for herself. Sometimes they spent the night at the beach and cleaned up at a truck stop; sometimes they slept at a campground, where she made soup on outdoor grills. Kennedy strove to keep the children clean, well fed, and happy, and the details of how she succeeded are fascinating. Fortunately, by late summer she managed to save enough of her tips to put down a deposit on an apartment and move her family into it. The friends she made, the babysitting help her coworkers gave her, an affair and a new job also enter into her story, but the heart of this account is the author’s love for her children and her determination to keep her family safe, sound, and together.
Frightening yet heartening—perfect movie material.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03366-9
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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