A moving account of awareness of privilege and the courage to move beyond it.
A memoir of a relationship between a domestic worker and her employer’s daughter.
Sanford, a founding member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and co-author and co-editor of multiple editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, offers a riveting account of her friendship with her family’s housekeeper. Growing up in a well-off WASP family, Sanford experienced all the perks of their world. The story begins with the arrival of a young Black domestic worker named Mary White, who was just 15—barely older than the author—when she started working for the family in 1956.The book chronicles the changing dynamics of their relationship—which became a close friendship—along with Sanford’s own process of moving away from her privileged milieu and later coming out as a lesbian. White was never treated“like one of the family” even though she became an invaluable member of the household—even caring for the author’s mother when she was seriously ill. She worked for Sanford’s family for many years in many capacities, even after finding work as a corrections officer. The author tells of how White managed and covered for severe family problems, including both parents’ alcoholism and Sanford’s father’s abusive behavior. She also describes how White’s work led to a great deal of self-sacrifice, including following Sanford’s parents to Florida when they retired there, and why she did so wasn’t always about money. Over the course of this book, the author reflects on the personal growth and increasing awareness that accompanied her changing relationship with White. Along the way, she effectively highlights the uneasy dance that she undertook as they moved away from an employer-employee dynamic and how she learned to let White do her job when she was on the job (“My resistance to her proffered help assaulted her in ways I would later come to regret”). Overall, it’s an excellent and revealing account of their friendship, although it’s likely to make readers wish that White could have written a parallel memoir telling her own story.
A moving account of awareness of privilege and the courage to move beyond it.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 318
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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