An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.
In this debut memoir, a little girl in war-torn 1940s Germany grows up to become a successful American businesswoman.
Parrent was too young to remember the bombings that decimated her German city of Essen during World War II, as she was born in 1942. Her three older siblings, however, knew what the warning sound of sirens meant. One of her brothers was forced to join the Hitler Youth, and the family wasn’t told where he was—or if he was alive or dead. Parrent’s father—whose hair had turned white when he was a young soldier in World War I—refused to join the Nazi Party. Because of this, Nazis beat him so badly that he had to have a metal plate implanted in his head. By piecing together her family’s memories, the author paints a portrait of the terror of war that will have readers on the edges of their seats. Her own memories begin with extreme poverty, as her previously middle-class family was forced to scavenge the countryside for scraps of food. These bleak, deeply poignant scenes are the most gripping part of this short account; for example, as a tiny child, she was thrilled by a single pear a lady had given her, because having fruit at all was such a rarity. Parrent’s clear, incisive, and often vivid prose flows quickly: “The destruction of the bombings erased all shrubs and trees, and no flowers lived anywhere.” After her mother’s horrific death, she says that she faced abuse from her father—he once beat her so badly that she lost consciousness, she writes—before she married and moved to America. This strong woman’s subsequent story intertwines sorrow (the death of a son, divorce, and the deaths of two husbands) with joy (the birth of a daughter) as she tells of working to create a successful temp-agency business, which she opened in 1979. The conclusion, however, is disappointingly abrupt, listing her current activities, including community theater and flying lessons.
An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0750-7
Page Count: 106
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
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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