This work chronicles an instructively detailed, albeit odd, journey through family court.
In Book 2 of this autobiographical series, a man attempts to reconcile with his adoptive daughter.
In Book 1, which related a bizarre and entrenched skirmish with the juvenile court system, Cambridge (Denied! Failing Cordelia: Book One, 2014) explained his complex relationship with an adopted daughter he referred to as Cordelia. In this second installment, the author explores a number of legal battles in which his “overriding objective” was reunification with the teenage Cordelia. It is a war, the reader learns early on, that has already been lost. By the time of the volume’s publication, Cordelia was legally an adult, and the author could not see her due to a restraining order. Nevertheless, Cambridge has a great deal to say about what happened and waxes on subjects ranging from restraining orders to an imaginary speech he would like to hear read in court. Throughout these pages, the author sees himself largely as a victim of Shakespearean proportions, whether at the hands of a disinterested attorney or from flaws attributable to his own Asperger’s syndrome. Then there is Cambridge’s penchant for extended metaphors (for example, he discusses a legal procedure that “could make the Titanic seem agile in trying to avoid the iceberg that sank it”). Such attempts at engendering sympathy do not always succeed, particularly since Cordelia, regardless of her own mental health and emotional challenges, for the most part seems to not want a reconciliation. And while the author may not be the most relatable figure to pass through the legal process, his perspective is an undeniably singular one. As he asserts: “Having direct experience of both adopting a legally free child and then of fighting for her in a dependency case, I feel uniquely qualified to be able to speak directly to the joys of the former and the cruelty of the latter.” The book digs deeply into child-parent legalities, and, though the conclusion is foregone, Cambridge’s many struggles are informative. Diverse challenges, like the “two-stage process” of a Section 388 petition, are explained by someone who has lived through them. The book manages to incorporate practical issues (such as hiring an attorney versus using a public defender) into an inherently sad and strange overarching story.
This work chronicles an instructively detailed, albeit odd, journey through family court.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-8891-1
Page Count: 698
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
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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