A disturbing memoir, but one that could possibly be instructive for readers involved in adoption.
In this debut autobiography, an adoptive father rails against the Los Angeles family court system after it takes away his adopted daughter following an accusation of abuse.
The book centers on Cambridge’s account of his misadventures with the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services and its “Commissioner No,” his lengthy tale’s bête noire. In April 2008, the childless author and his wife legally adopted the 12-year-old “Cordelia” in Washington state. She’d been diagnosed with a psychological disorder marked by inappropriate responses to social interactions, which proved to be a major difficulty. Cambridge writes that he was fervent in his desire to be a good father, and he says that this required, on one occasion, for him to shower nude with the then-teenage Cordelia, at her request. By late 2008, his wife had fled their Seattle household for Los Angeles. Then, one day in July 2009, the author and his daughter had an argument; during this, he says, Cordelia viciously bit him. In what he calls the greatest mistake of his life, he called the police; Cordelia then alleged abuse, and authorities sent her to live with her adoptive mother in California. The author consequently embarked on a losing struggle, related here, to get her back, made more difficult by his own 2012 diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. A bibliography of books, articles, studies, and other resources on adoption, family law, and mental disorders ends this chaotic memoir. Cambridge, a transplanted Englishman who loves Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, and his home state of Washington, presents a feverish but long-winded cry for justice here. Only after much throat clearing, though, does he even reveal the unfortunate circumstances that ended his relationship with the girl, whom he calls “Cordelia,” after King Lear’s youngest and only true-hearted daughter. This smoldering but sometimes-carping and repetitive volume is the first of three that he plans to publish. By the end of this one, readers will find that Cambridge emerges with one great virtue intact: he seems honest, to a fault.
A disturbing memoir, but one that could possibly be instructive for readers involved in adoption.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4990-4692-2
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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