Self-indulgent and only occasionally interesting.
A Dutch-born woman’s memoir about how she stumbled into an unexpected career as a globe-trotting photojournalist.
Molenaar’s fascination with faraway places began when she was a child. But her early years in Rotterdam were nothing like the magical worlds that populated her daydreams. She felt alienated from her family, as though she was always “slightly in the wrong.” When World War II intervened, Germany occupied Holland, creating hardship and misery for all Dutch citizens. After the war, a traumatized Molenaar left for Switzerland. In between her first marriage and divorce, she discovered photography. It was only after she met, married and began working alongside distinguished magazine journalist Frederic Grunfeld, however, that she was able to transform her love for travel and image-making into a way of life she “had not dared to imagine since childhood.” They made the Spanish island of Mallorca their home and hobnobbed with the likes of Robert Graves, John Cheever and Anthony Burgess. In the meantime, joint assignments took them to locations all over the world, including Alaska, Afghanistan and India. But as Molenaar grew into her profession, and into her husband’s equal, the marriage collapsed, and she found herself forced to make a living to support herself and her children. The author’s career blossomed, and soon, she was going on shoots in such exotic locales as Brazil, Tanzania and Mongolia. Between adventures, she married again and moved to France, where she made acquaintances with Joseph Heller and Lawrence Durrell. She was unable to disobey the “inner summons” to adventure, and she grew apart from her husband and divorced. That Molenaar has led a challenging but privileged life is clear. Her narrative, however, is a structurally undisciplined hodgepodge of memories, anecdotes and travelogue that is more likely to irk readers than engage them.
Self-indulgent and only occasionally interesting.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-410-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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