A candid rendering of pain and survival.
A daughter’s raw memoir exposes her “spiteful, vindictive, uncontrollable mother.”
Journalist Leve (It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, 2010, etc.), a former columnist for the London Sunday Times Magazine and contributor to other journals, grew up in a Manhattan penthouse with her mother, a poet whose narcissism, unpredictable mood swings, and physical abuse the author recounts in repetitive detail. At times “slapped, punched, kicked, pinched, and attacked,” subjected to hysterical tirades alternating with suffocating demonstrations of love, Leve felt abandoned, betrayed, and continually threatened, as if she were stranded “in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach.” Some measure of safety came during visits to her adored father, who lived in Thailand and whom Leve portrays as flawless; from her father’s former girlfriend, whose nurturing attention brought a bit of stability to Leve’s life in New York; and from a succession of caretakers, many of whom fled from her mother’s employ. One woman quit or was fired multiple times over the course of 12 years. By her mid-40s, Leve still felt indelibly wounded and oppressed by the past. “You understand these things and you’re in control of your life,” her father remarks. “Why can’t you beat those demons and destroy them?” Overcoming the demons, however, proved complicated: Leve learned that childhood stress and abuse caused "pathological changes to brain chemistry,” making her “hypervigilant” and “highly reactive to perceived threats.” Desperate for help, she decided to undergo eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, designed to treat PTSD. Two years later, she was living with her Italian lover and his daughters in Bali, finally feeling central to a family. Though still beset by memories, she was also buoyed by “endorphins of hope” that she finally would be able to “outrace the past.”
A candid rendering of pain and survival.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-226945-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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