A mostly dull rendering of the author’s attempt to “live up to [her] birthright.”
Plodding memoir about a woman's Wyoming childhood and her adult attempts to live up to her ranching heritage.
When bestselling author Mead-Ferro (Confessions of a Slacker Wife, 2005, etc.) unexpectedly received the clothes in which her ranchwoman mother Mary had died, she was on the verge of giving up her cattle ranch. She had returned to her native Wyoming with her family to make a part-time go at the profession that had defined her parents, especially her mother, but setbacks and doubts about her own abilities as a rancher caused her to almost abandon the project. However, the sight of her mother's clothes caused her to rethink her plans and awakened memories of a childhood spent on the range. Her family's multiple Jackson Hole ranches were "literally the stuff of postcards and paintings.” Mead-Ferro realized that this beauty and order, along with everything she experienced on that ranch, were the fruit of three generations' worth of commitment and sacrifice. In tribute to her forebears, she chronicles their lives, starting with her great-grandfather. While he accumulated the land and cattle, his son solidified the family's reputation by becoming governor and later, a Wyoming state senator. His daughter, Mary, and her husband then became stewards of the land. The author provides some vivid details about the mechanics of ranch life, but her awkward, strained attempts at folksiness, marginally interesting character portraits and general lack of insight make for unsatisfying reading.
A mostly dull rendering of the author’s attempt to “live up to [her] birthright.”Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8064-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: TwoDot/Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
