A grown man reads through a diary of his father’s travels in China and Tibet, written long ago and kept locked away for many years in a red box. S°s grew up in Prague in the 1950s, where his father Vladimir worked as a filmmaker. Ordered by the Communist authorities to make a documentary of a road construction in China, Vladimir becomes separated from his film crew and lost in Tibet. His diary describes his wanderings in that strange and magical place: to find his way home, Vladimir hikes through endless mountain ranges, is given shelter by Buddhist monks, and eventually meets the Dalai Lama himself. Beautiful illustrations of Tibetan-style art, illuminated reproductions of Vladimir’s diary, and richly colored landscapes, all by the author, combine with the haunting story of a young boy’s longing for his absent father to create an enchanting and delightful piece of work.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-37552-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A book of hope for lives that need turning around.
The story of how discovering the secret of her birth transformed Stein’s life.
In the opening chapter, the author recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl of mixed, uncertain race adopted into an academic family and a life of the arts, she found a letter that devastated her. Her adoptive mother had long ago made a request that the author’s birth certificate be altered so that she would never learn that she had been born in prison to a heroin-addicted mother. It also seems that, as a baby, she had passed through a series of foster homes, none of which she remembers. “I tuck the paper back into the liner and float from the dresser into my parents’ bedroom and stare at myself in the mirror over the sink, my body in overload” writes Stein. “Time and space distort inside me, I don’t know where I am.” Perhaps the revelation comes too early in the narrative, before readers have gotten a chance to get to know the writer, but such overwriting (and overdramatizing) initially seems to undermine a story that is powerful enough on its own. Through the first half of the memoir, it remains difficult to get to know Stein due to the fact that she doesn’t really know herself. She plainly had some behavioral issues before the revelation—a deep resentment toward her adoptive parents, a penchant for acting out and a hyperactive mind that would likely be diagnosed as ADD—but she spiraled downward into addiction, crime, and unsatisfying sex with both men and women before she turned her life around. The redemptive second half of the memoir explains much of the first, as she learns what heroin in utero can cause, follows a paper trail back to her prison origin, comes to terms with both her birth mother and her adoptive family, and devotes her life to helping and raising consciousness about women in prison.
A book of hope for lives that need turning around.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9810-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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