A thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir.
A mother’s debut account of abducting her child to save him from his abusive father.
In 1973, at the height of the feminist movement, Murphy met Guy Johnson, the son of famed author Maya Angelou, through her best friend, Mary. Soon, all three of them engaged in an untraditional love triangle, living in relative harmony and eking out a meager existence with marginal bouts of employment and creative ingenuity. In the early chapters, Murphy, in succinct, articulate prose, relates her tumultuous relationship with Johnson. She initially dismissed his abrasive personality as challenging but soon realized that he had quite a sadistic streak. When Murphy became pregnant, she hoped that Johnson’s attitude toward her would soften, but it was not to be—indeed, as her pregnancy progressed, Johnson’s anger toward her only increased. The author adeptly recounts the intense, fearful incidents that she endured just before her son Colin was born. Johnson, she writes, angrily proclaimed that Murphy was unfit to raise their child, and eventually the verbal abuse turned physical, forcing her to leave their home and seek a divorce. She writes of finding herself helpless against Johnson’s attempts to remove her son from her life completely, thanks to Johnson’s ties to the community and his mother’s fame and abundant finances. After Johnson badly beat her and she lost her court battles, she took her son and went into hiding for four years with the aid of her friends and four sisters. During her years underground, Murphy learned a lot about herself and, through her work with women’s shelters and other programs, helped other abused women. After a former friend turned her in, she reexamined her initial motives and feelings that caused her to run, and, through a 12-step program, came to terms with many of her personal issues and firmly held convictions, which allowed her to finally begin healing. Throughout this engaging memoir, she deftly tells her life story—from her abusive childhood to her seemingly selfless act of saving her son—with meticulous attention to detail (“I flipped [my Social Security card] into the fire and dropped my driver’s license on top of it. A shock ran through me as I watched them curl and darken and burn.”).
A thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490523446
Page Count: 480
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
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
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