Nevertheless, worthwhile for women struggling to define themselves. (16 pp. photos)
The 1998 World Masters champion in the women’s single shell tells how rowing changed her life and her family.
As Hall recounts it, she was the prototypical soccer mom: successful husband, three children, big house. But that house hid an abusive marriage. Although her husband never hit Hall, he regularly denigrated her, isolated her from friends and family, and demanded sex on his schedule (6:30 in the morning). Partly because of the children and partly because she did not recognize what was happening to her as domestic abuse, she remained in the marriage. But one morning in April 1995, the 42-year-old wife and mother had an epiphany. The sight of a lone rower in the waters off Long Island inspired her to find an escape in sculling. She set out on a course that led only three years later to a gold medal at the World Masters Games. Much of this is a description of Hall’s rowing experiences, explaining how she developed a communion with the boat and the water, acknowledging the fierce edge that made her so competitive. In the rest of the text, she reflects on the imbalance of her marriage and the crumbling of her spirit. Naturally, there are no easy answers, maybe no answers at all, when dealing with the subject of a verbally abusive marriage. But Hall has also left out crucial blocks of information. For instance, her husband complains about the cost of her psychotherapy, but she gives no account of that therapy or what it may or may not have taught her. Though some depictions of the competitive life’s rewards are compelling and universal, it’s hard for readers to cheerlead for a sport when so many of its basics have to be explained.
Nevertheless, worthwhile for women struggling to define themselves. (16 pp. photos)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04940-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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