Corroborates David’s memories, but provides no special insight into abuse.
Gut-wrenching recollections of the horrendous, years-long abuse inflicted on the author by his alcoholic, emotionally disturbed mother, and of his participation in the similar torture that his brother David described in A Child Called “It” (1999).
Pelzer has a guilty conscience, it seems, and so—for therapeutic reasons—one of his aims here is to explain why he was a coconspirator in the mental and physical tormenting of his older brother some 30 years ago. As a young child, he states, he lived in constant fear that he would replace his brother as the one of the five sons their mother singled out for particularly brutal treatment. In the interest of self-preservation, then, he became Mom’s accomplice, purposely creating situations that would arouse her wrath and lead to harsh punishment of David. After a time, he reports, he came to relish “the bitter sweetness of causing him harm.” Finally, in 1972, the authorities removed David from the family, and eight-year-old Richard, as he had feared, became the new object of his mother’s cruelty. Meanwhile, another brother took his place as her “Little Nazi.” What Pelzer was subjected to beggars the imagination: Mom’s tactics included bloody violence, degradation, and humiliation. Sometimes, though, the author’s memory seems suspect: Could anyone physically swallow four mouthfuls of Tabasco sauce, as he asserts he was once forced to do? It’s also hard to understand why no one intervened, since Pelzer makes it clear that relatives were aware of his mother’s drunkenness and mental instability, neighbors witnessed the beatings, a nurse at a local hospital recognized as child abuse the battery his body had received, and school authorities had previously seen the need to rescue his brother David. The author’s explanation is that community awareness of child abuse is much higher today than it was in the 1970s. If so, disturbing accounts by survivors like this one must take some credit for the change.
Corroborates David’s memories, but provides no special insight into abuse.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53368-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
