A harrowing account worth a hundred social-science textbooks.
The gritty memoir of a runaway who crawls out of the grave of our deepest urban nightmare.
Tina S. now helps the homeless, while Bolnick is a journalist and screenwriter who helped Tina get her former life into print. Tina's descent into homelessness begins with her father's death and a fire that drives her mother and siblings to a welfare hotel. The poverty and maddening fights in the one-room home with her mother's belligerent boyfriend drove her to escape, first with books, TV, cutting school, drinking alcohol and smoking reefer, and, finally, living in the surreal subterranean strata beneath Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. She stayed with a girlfriend she loved (who finally commits suicide) and a junkie boyfriend (who choked her for smoking crack while carrying his baby). Eventually Tina became a ward of Family Court—which proceeded to put her in the psycho ward of Bellevue for a month. The hospital cleaned up her grime, removed her lice, cured her wounds, and aborted her pregnancy, but the clean bed and regular meals (without bringing the day's panhandling or muggings to Burger King) couldn't keep Tina from returning to the streets—and below. There were lighter moments (such as trick-or-treating dressed as "bums" on Halloween) but in between the crack highs and harassment from family and the police were mostly a life of despair and deprivation. Tina got placed upstate in a boot camp–like detox and rehab center (a "Club Med for ex-junkies") and, after a shaky start, finally graduated from the program and earned her high school diploma. She even managed college and work. Her story is told with many flashbacks, and Bolnick narrates it with authenticity and sympathy.
A harrowing account worth a hundred social-science textbooks.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20047-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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