Compassion and empathy inform these gracefully wrought essays.
A thoughtful collection about how writing essays “is to be haunted by our own lies.”
In the title piece, Tisdale (Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom, 2006, etc.) wrestles with “the ethical dilemma of writing about people who have no say in what we write.” This question seems especially urgent when she writes about her family: her father, an industrial arts teacher, volunteer firefighter, and alcoholic; her mother, who taught music; and her brother and sister, with whom she has strained relationships. Her sister, she writes, “is especially angry about my newest book,” in which she feels unjustly portrayed, “and she is also just angry.” “What is fair for me to say about others?” asks the author. Truth or lies, she believes, are “all just stories; like snow falling, they cover everything up. Family, for most of us, includes lifelong agreements about what is not said.” Many essays focus on Tisdale’s three children, especially her middle son, a rebellious teenager with “a brief career as a juvenile delinquent.” The author meditates on the “stupefying losses” of watching her children outgrow babyhood and the heady responsibility of being “the giver and taker of the world” to them. Some essays discuss her experiences as a nurse. Outstanding among them is a beautiful, quietly meditative piece on her work at an abortion clinic where “weary, grim moments” are countered by her feeling that she offers “solidness” to women in need of her strength. Abortion, she writes, is “merciful violence” that requires “a willingness to live with conflict, fearlessness, and grief.” Less moving is a piece set in an oncology unit, in which reportage overwhelms narrative. Tisdale also looks at women’s obsession with thinness; the phenomenon of Disneyland; and the culture of high school, where the atmosphere is “like some three-dimensional model of chaos theory.”
Compassion and empathy inform these gracefully wrought essays.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9904370-8-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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