A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.
A Vermont-based artist and musician chronicles the serpentine saga of her family’s legacy of struggles and abuse in this debut memoir.
With cleareyed, unvarnished prose and dynamic details, Bedi vividly traces her family lineage back to her ancestors’ arrival on American shores as Slavic immigrants “during the first decade of the twentieth century.” But across this ancestral lore are several dark shadows in the form of murder, suicide, and interfamilial abuse. These tragedies shook the Bedi bloodline to its core and soured the author’s youth and adulthood. Through the use of family tree graphics, photographs, official records, newspaper clippings, and her own memories, the author generously shares the story of her paternal grandfather, Eli, who was murdered in 1917, supposedly at the hands of his wife, Flora. Bedi believes the crime was spurred by a love triangle and that Flora’s lover “actually killed Eli.” When Flora was charged with homicide, her children (including the author’s father) were placed in a Vermont orphanage where they grew up in a neglectful, abusive environment. Bedi’s maternal grandfather killed himself over “the loss of the Czar’s Russia” and “the shame” of incestuous affairs. Her father became a gifted machinist while her mother, Laura, born to Russian immigrants, grew up on a farm and was unpredictable as an adult. Unafraid to reveal the truth about her family’s melodrama, Bedi writes candidly about the bewilderment she felt over her parents’ mismatched marriage in 1937, given that her tempestuous mother “clearly was mentally ill and Dad was an abused orphan.” In this melancholy account, she expresses outrage at Laura and “Gram” for allowing a legacy of intergenerational abuse to proliferate within their family for decades. Despite the hardships experienced by her ancestors that infused her worldview, Bedi’s own history in the final chapter is evoked with generous anecdotes about her immense artistic interests in music education even as her aging mother’s mental state deteriorated further. Upon Laura’s death, the author “cried then, not because she was dead but because the chance for her to realize what she had done was dead too.” Though her mother’s cycle of cruelty died with her, Bedi admits to still struggling toward complete forgiveness and some catharsis as an adult survivor of child abuse, and that her own happiness remains a work in progress.
A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5790-8
Page Count: 66
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
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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