A somewhat repetitive but endearing story of an adoptee’s struggle to forgive old wounds and redefine his senses of self and...
In his debut memoir, Mulkey tells how he forged a relationship with his biological father and brother, discovered a vast network of extended family, and underwent all the upheaval and soul-searching along the way.
Mulkey grew up knowing he was adopted and that his mother was a young, unwed Canadian woman who traveled to Oregon to give birth and sign over her rights to her newborn son to his adoptive family. It was only as a college undergraduate that he discovered the whereabouts of his biological father and brother. Though his biological mother had died, Mulkey decided to make contact with what was left of his family, and in so doing, he was plunged into the midst of not only an identity crisis, but a complicated family feud that played out over three countries and two continents. He endured the abusive, negligent behavior of his birth father, Giulio, along with a competitive rivalry with his brother, Paul. Increasingly, the author found himself negotiating a minefield of accusation and ill feeling among Giulio, his adoptive family, his biological mother’s family, and his boisterous and loving extended family in Italy. Mulkey grappled with depression and financial setbacks as he worked to determine his loyalties and his ever unfolding sense of identity. Mulkey’s voice is engaging from the start, and his ability to communicate humor and absurdity amid heartbreak is admirable, as when he tells of being terrified by his cousin Sergio’s impromptu re-enactment of a scene from The Shining after Mulkey took him to a shooting location for the film earlier in the day. While detailed depictions and character sketches engage, the more ruminative analysis can be repetitive. For instance, at the end of the book, Mulkey realizes that he was “fiercely envious” of his brother’s success, as if it were a sudden revelation rather than an oft-repeated defining characteristic of their relationship.
A somewhat repetitive but endearing story of an adoptee’s struggle to forgive old wounds and redefine his senses of self and family.Pub Date: June 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482608076
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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