by Sibilla Hershey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2017
A gripping—if sometimes unpolished—recollection of war and recovery.
A memoir recounts a woman’s search for happiness after a childhood terrorized by war.
When debut author Hershey was a young child, Europe was roiled by World War II, and her native Latvia was squeezed between the twin tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin. Starting at the age of 5, she spent four consecutive summers on her maternal grandmother’s farm in Riga, not far from the Baltic Sea. These were dangerous times, as there were often air raids causing frighteningly close explosions. Sometimes, pilots parachuted right down into fields from their ravaged aircraft and then disappeared into the trees. Soviet and German ground troops, too, came marching through, often hunting for provisions. In 1944, the war took a ferocious turn: the Germans were on the run, the Americans were leaving, and the author and her family were compelled to evade Soviet troops and leave Latvia. They went to Germany via Poland and spent the next six years living in refugee camps. After being turned down by both Australian and Canadian authorities, Hershey’s family made their way to the United States. She attended high school in New York City, studied chemistry at Brooklyn College, and found a job at the Rockefeller Institute, where she met her husband. But she suffered implacable depression, haunted by the trauma of her childhood years. Hershey finally decided she needed to write it all down and embedded herself in the literary community in Sacramento. Throughout this book, Hershey writes achingly about the lingering effects of her beleaguered youth: “I agonized about my major over solitary lunches in a small garden on the campus, where I had a squirrel for company,” she engagingly writes. “I had many interests but no compelling passions.” Also, she chillingly wraps the entire tale in the folds of a family tragedy—her grandfather’s murder in the dead of night, when her mother was just 14 years old. That said, the story meanders toward the end, as her remembrances of later vacations and foreign travel simply don’t stand up to the dramatic accounts that precede them.
A gripping—if sometimes unpolished—recollection of war and recovery.Pub Date: April 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5441-9610-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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