Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain and wit.
A journalist and award-winning author’s mordantly humorous memoir about caring for, and surviving, her terminally ill mother.
Hip Mama publisher Gore (All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob, Shame, and Barbie-Envy, 2011, etc.) was living in Portland, Ore., and raising a small son with her lesbian partner, Sol, when she discovered that her charming but violent and capricious mother, Eve, was dying of cancer. Convinced that she needed to do as the Tibetan yogis she admired did and “go to the places that scared [her],” she became Eve’s caregiver. Sol, in turn, demanded that they all move to the colorfully quirky city of Santa Fe, a place she had long romanticized—and where a female mime she had once loved still lived. But before Gore could even get resettled, her mother took over the house her daughter had bought and began renovating it. While the author and her family scrambled to make a life “out of stardust and panic,” Eve flirted outrageously with an Anaïs Nin scholar–turned-contractor, watched Hollywood noir movies and reminded everyone that she was dying. Spurred by this comically inappropriate behavior and memories of Eve re-enacting the wire hanger scene from Mommie Dearest for fun, Gore stood up to her mother—and got thrown out. In the meantime, Sol stalked her old girlfriend, and the life Gore had “always imagined she [wanted]” soon fell apart. Desperate to understand her own role in making “all this violence seem necessary and inevitable,” Gore fled to a house outside of Santa Fe where she began redefining the meaning of love. By turns tender and heartbreaking, Gore’s book is a brave, thoroughly authentic journey to the center of the human heart.
Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain and wit.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9860007-9-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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