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ITHAKA

A DAUGHTER'S MEMOIR OF BEING FOUND

Saffian’s record is a tribute to both families, who behaved sensitively throughout.

A vividly realized memoir by an adoptee who was eventually "found" by her birth parents.

Journalist and former New York Daily News reporter Saffian shared a comfortable, upper-middle-class life with a loving, supportive family. Though her adoptive mother died when she was only six years old, within a few years her father remarried; her new mother, too, was thoroughly devoted to her. To her parents' credit, she feels as bonded to them as do her siblings, who are their biological offspring. By the time she was 24 and a graduate of Brown University, Saffian had a comfortable apartment, a caring boyfriend, and an engaging job. But when she was contacted by her natural mother, her entire life was thrust off course. Feeling cheated that she was not the one to conduct the search, she wasn't ready to welcome her birth parents into her life. Even though they were loving and open, Saffian couldn't help but view them as intruders; she was determined to get to know them, yet on her own terms. She questioned, for example, how they could claim to love her before they'd even met her as an adult. During the three-year period leading from her birth mother’s initial phone call to Saffian’s meeting with her birth parents, she involved herself in a painful journey of self-discovery. Sharing letters, memories, and insights, the author takes us with her on this sometimes torturous yet ultimately satisfying trip. Also included here is an appendix listing organizations and support groups for those involved with the adoption process, along with a bibliography of books about adoption.

Saffian’s record is a tribute to both families, who behaved sensitively throughout.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998

ISBN: 0-465-03618-X

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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