Vance details her coming-of-age in the 1970s, including her journey of self-discovery, spiritual awakening and acceptance of self that has lasted four decades.
A child of divorce in the tumultuous ’70s, Vance experiments with drugs, sex and spirituality starting with the Jesus Movement and trekking through a variety of world religions and belief systems on her walk-about quest for spiritual enlightenment. Her journey takes her around the world and includes an ever-changing cast of lovers and friends, beginning with Burkhard, the man who would be her first love and the one who first betrayed her. Her experiences illuminate the darker side of humanity and include date rape, abuse and five abortions, yet each are instrumental in leading her deeper in her quest for understanding. Those moments in her life finally open her up to the concept that, in her words, “[w]e are all in a very sophisticated holographic virtual reality game.” Her belief that those involved with organized religions are unenlightened is implied throughout while she enthusiastically touts the freedom and oneness with the universe that is achieved with meditation and remembrance of past lives. Peace is ultimately achieved when she realizes that relationships are contracted and agreed upon before birth in an effort to work out negative energy and ensure that karma is satisfied. While the essence of the book reminds one of Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2007), Vance’s choppy prose lacks the finesse and flow of that work; Vance transitioning from past to present and future within a single paragraph. For those that share Vance’s search for understanding, the memoir will spur an increased determination to delve into the mysteries of life. Those who follow conventional belief systems will find the book a random collection of philosophies and ideas formed into predictable New Age chatter. A candid, unrefined look at one woman’s spiritual quest.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466326651
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2012
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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