An oversummarized memoir that shortchanges its subject’s inspiring life story.
Tiernan (Celebrate Japan, 1990) relates a life filled with turmoil, tragedy, persistence, and triumph.
The author, nicknamed Zip, begins her story by remarking that her friends and acquaintances have often asked her to write a memoir, and it isn’t a hard claim to believe. She was born near the beginning of World War II to a complicated Vancouver couple whose income troubles and demanding, punitive attitudes toward their children often overshadowed happier moments. Tiernan writes that she was first sexually assaulted as a 4-year-old by an unknown attacker and later again, repeatedly, by her father. As an adult, she also suffered hardships, including a divorce and the death of her young daughter. Her memoir is honest about the dark moments in her life, but it also stands as a testament to her perseverance. Her fundamental desire to thrive took her to a small logging camp, a Girl Guide center in Mexico, and homes all over Japan, often as a teacher or a guide to young people. This book is ultimately about surviving by being open to new experiences. But although Tiernan’s story is memorable, she describes it much too quickly, so that readers who’ve never met her personally will likely find it difficult to engage with it. She relates most episodes and observations in summary, with each chapter containing a series of paragraph-length memories; punctuation errors are also frequent, though not pervasive. A good memoir requires retrospection and introspection as well as a unifying narrative structure. These are sometimes present here, and when they are, the story can be quite moving; at one point, for example, she writes of her striking adult realization that her mother’s refusal to stop her father’s attacks was partially a result of the family’s economic dependence on him. However, the book doesn’t sustain this quality of retrospective analysis in most other chapters.
An oversummarized memoir that shortchanges its subject’s inspiring life story.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-9082-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
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
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.
