A striking, sensitive record of voyages and acceptance.
A California native recalls coming-of-age in the 1960s, the deaths of her parents and her Muslim ex-husband, and many travels in this debut memoir.
Baldwin was born into privilege, the daughter of a handsome, well-known architect with a showpiece home in a Southern California beach community. She details how this idyllic existence soon disintegrated, however, in part due to her father’s drinking and infidelity. She and her sister then lived with their mother in Palm Springs but also regularly visited their bon vivant father, remarried to another heavy drinker with her own children. Baldwin’s stepsister committed suicide, a shocking event that contributed to Baldwin’s entering an early marriage with the son of a wealthy family. The young couple hit the road in a Volkswagen Bus, delving into psychedelic drugs and other 1960s happenings in Haight-Ashbury, Guadalajara, and elsewhere. The marriage eventually dissolved, leaving Baldwin to raise her son alone. At this halfway point of the memoir, Baldwin skips ahead 40 years and writes about the deaths of her parents and her ex, rewinding to previous events in between, including when Baldwin moved to Mexico. She stayed in touch with her ex while continuing to live an itinerant existence, including in Morocco, and ultimately converted to Islam. Baldwin remembers her stepsister again near the end of her memoir, as well as others she lost, noting, “And in the imaginary landscape of memory and projection, all the ghosts dance free.” Baldwin’s beautifully observed memoir captures the early 1960s spirit: “we were the nation’s children, swallowing power chemicals to discover ancient roots. We crawled from the sea as single-celled organisms and witnessed the birth of complexity.” She also provides touching tableaux of dealing with death and accepting the flaws of loved ones. This impressionistic memoir skims over some potentially interesting subjects, with little detail provided about Baldwin’s second marriage or her financial situation, which apparently allowed for continued travels around the world. Overall, however, it’s an evocative, memorable memoir.
A striking, sensitive record of voyages and acceptance.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-822-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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