A raw, emotionally intense memoir.
A poet and American Book Award–winning memoirist tells the story of his troubled family and the sustaining relationship he shared with his brother.
González (English/Rutgers Univ., Newark; Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Toward a 21st Century Poetics, 2017, etc.) and his family left Mexico for the Coachella Valley when he and his younger brother, Alex, were still children. But the better life they sought across the border in the United States did not materialize. Crammed into a tiny house, 19 family members attempted to make the best of difficult circumstances that included hunger, poverty, and abuse at the hands of a cruel and controlling grandfather. By the time González reached adolescence, he and Alex faced other traumas: the death of their beloved mother and desertion by their father, who relocated back to Mexico without them. The losses impacted each brother deeply: the author “withdrew into a depression that [his] family members called shyness,” and Alex began to spend time with high school dropouts who did little else but smoke and drink. At the same time, loss helped forge the fierce bond that helped both survive loneliness and hardship. Their paths diverged when González became the first member of his family to go to college while Alex returned to Mexico to live with their father. But even as the author immersed himself in his work, his emerging gay identity, and a career as a writer and teacher in New York City, he still maintained a close connection to his brother. That bond became their salvation when each brother faced midlife challenges rooted in the early experiences that had stripped them of parental love and positive role models. For González, those challenges involved alcoholism and unconsciously seeking out abusive relationships; for his brother, they involved coming to terms with what it meant to be a good husband and father. Generous and intimate, González’s memoir offers a riveting account of the bond that saved two brothers from their tortured past while offering lucid glimpses into the meaning of Latino manhood.
A raw, emotionally intense memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-299-31690-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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