Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.
Intensely personal essays explore autobiography as a means of creative self-examination.
Foster (All the Lost Girls, 2000) organizes these pieces, most of which have previously been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, into three sections: “Inside the Girls’ Room,” “Inside the Writing Room,” and “Inside My Skin.” Or so the table of contents indicates. The actual arrangement bears little resemblance to the proposed structure, which seems to have been an attempt to form a cohesive whole out of essays written at different times in the author’s life. No matter. Their unity of theme persists regardless of their placement here. The author looks closely at what it means to be a southerner, to be white, to be middle-class, and to be a woman in the various roles that that implies. She examines how her life has been shaped by her genteel upbringing in a small southern town where girls were expected to be charming. Ambition, she admits, “swam through my bloodstream like a virus,” and she puzzled over how to pursue it without relinquishing feminine charm. After college and a failed marriage, she returned to her parents’ home in Alabama in her 20s, conflicted and confused. Fleeing the South, where she didn’t fit in, Foster moved to Los Angeles, attempted for a while to write fiction, and then moved to Iowa, where she discovered that writing autobiography was her métier, a way to tell her own story and probe her own identity. One of her most effective pieces, “Skin,” tells of trying to teach memoir writing to a class of 20 people in a storefront library in Tuskegee, a small town in Alabama’s Black Belt. Foster, who arrived believing that autobiographical writing would somehow magically bring people closer to themselves as well as to each other, feels anxious, awkward, and terribly conscious of her whiteness. By the second day the class has shrunk to six, and the writing lesson becomes a lesson in racism.
Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2688-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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