Eugster recalls some powerful memories, but they’re too often buried in an undisciplined narrative with too many superfluous...
A professional psychologist depicts her difficult childhood in a Virginia commune during the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Eugster’s debut memoir often surprises, occasionally strains credulity—does she really remember verbatim long conversations from her 11th year?—and generally saddens. After a brief introduction, she launches into one of her most disturbing memories: a natural childbirth she witnessed at age eight. Struck by nausea, she slipped away and returned only for a meal that included steaming broth—made, she learned too late, with the just-expelled placenta. The narrative then retreats a little, relating why the author’s parents split (an attempt at open marriage that didn’t work out) and how, later, her eccentric mother decided to cash out various investments and start a communal-living project called “Future Village.” (Still later, as the community branched out into a Summerhill-type free school, the name became “Nethers.”) Mom moved herself and three daughters to a succession of rural Virginia retreats, where the author watched a motley variety of people come and go. Most didn’t stay long, which was probably a good thing: Many seemed marginally sane, sexually stunted and/or socially challenged. A few times, Eugster leaps into the present to record conversations with her still-weird mother, including one touching exchange about what happens when adults force their dreams on their young. The author’s education at Nethers was sporadic. She read voraciously, once attempting Moby-Dick in a treetop, but took her own desultory time learning much else. Years passed. She spent some idyllic interludes with her father, who seemed vaguely puzzled by it all, and eventually made it to college. After an extended period of adjustment, she got over her commune years—sort of.
Eugster recalls some powerful memories, but they’re too often buried in an undisciplined narrative with too many superfluous details.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-89733-561-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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