The author sheds light on an unresolved, multigenerational crisis in American family life, typified by the divorce rates.
Former US News & World Report senior editor Thomas (Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, 2007) examines the zeitgeist of her generation in this compelling memoir.
“For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question,” she writes. “ ‘When did your parents get divorced?’ ” The author castigates the self-absorption of her own parents, who even before the dissolution of their marriage neglected her and her younger brother, virtually abandoning them to the care of live-in babysitters. “One of the things I have always despised so intensely about Boomers and their divorces was how breathtakingly egocentric they were,” she writes. “They were so eager to trade in their children's very sense of safety in the world for access to an unfettered sex life and a sense of ‘personal fulfillment.’ ” The author blames her parents for her adolescent slide into a punk-rock subculture. At 19, she pulled herself together, enrolled in college and became a workaholic in pursuit of a career in journalism. She met Cal, her husband-to-be, at her first full-time job at a computer magazine. They lived together for six years, then married and had two children—divorcing in 2007 to her intense dismay. Until the birth of her children, she was bedeviled by an inner sense of worthlessness and depended upon her husband for emotional support. Their married life was built upon their devotion to their children—she scaled down her career, and they both worked from home—but as a couple they drew further apart. Thomas chronicles how, despite her critical view of consumer culture, they became enmeshed in home ownership and what she describes as nest-building. Major events such as 9/11 are only touched on as they impinge on her family and providing a secure environment for children.
The author sheds light on an unresolved, multigenerational crisis in American family life, typified by the divorce rates.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6882-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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