A terrifying testament.
Unapologetic and affecting debut memoir of the author’s search for an errant mother, interweaving personal and family chronicles with the history of her native Hawaii.
The tale begins on Thanksgiving 2002. Smith, 32, “unmarried, childless, and untethered,” is out looking for mom, a homeless, relapsed heroin addict named Karen Morgan who has been missing for six months. “I don’t know why I think my mother is my responsibility, but I do. I am afraid my mother is going to die out here . . . people die on the street, and this is why I am here.” Karen’s personal descent, however, started years before. Born in 1950 on a plantation outside Honolulu, she belonged to a once-wealthy family that by the end of the 20th century could be described as “tropical colonials in reduced circumstances.” Karen was a ’60s casualty, footloose and destructive, who “formally abandoned” her daughter at age seven; Smith was raised by her father and stepmother. The author’s dedication and involvement with her feckless mother is both heartbreaking and fascinating. Add to this a fierce attachment to Hawaii, and you have the makings of a memoir in the spirit of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. Smith is the best kind of survivor: a graduate of Dartmouth and Columbia who has forged loving relationships with her two sisters (each of Karen’s daughters has a different father) and managed to keep her compassion intact. The search for her mother is, in truth, a search for herself, and she rebuilds her past by mining her memories, in the processes painting an alluring but unromantic portrait of life and society on the Hawaiian islands. She seems too willing to excuse her mother’s excesses, but Smith’s ability to lay bare her own emotional turmoil more than makes up for her generosity.
A terrifying testament.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3679-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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