With the assistance of co-author Vollers (Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw, 2006, etc.), actress Judd delivers a keenly felt memoir of a dysfunctional upbringing twined with an adult life of progressive social advocacy.
Some wag once said that the Judd family put the “fun” in dysfunctional, but Ashley remembers the turbulence rather differently, as “a family full of hatred, fighting, accusation, manipulation, abandonment, and emotional and physical abuse,” with everything “from depression, suicide, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling to incest and suspected murder. Judd examines her difficult history, braiding it with her current days as a committed activist for human rights. Though she calls readers’ attention to her movie-star status as she rubs humanitarian-circuit shoulders with Bono, Juanes (“the Colombian rock superstar”) and Bollywood’s Akshay Kumar (“the Indian equivalent of Will Smith or Bruce Willis, but with a fan base of a billion people”), she also comes across as a piercingly effective global ambassador for Population Services International, tackling issues of reproductive health and child survival. At first, she was undone by her visits to third-world brothels, but she eventually realized that her own sexual abuse was causing the over-identification, subverting her agenda. “I understand the urge to rescue everybody,” says her PSI boss, “but that’s not how it works. PSI is not a rescue organization. We are a public health organization.” The author writes with a sure hand of the many difficult themes she addresses: her journey of emotional recovery (a fine chapter on her rehab for codependency and depression), her spiritual quest, finding the humanity in the sexual perpetrators and making tangible her toils for social justice. Judd is also a solid painter of place, from the most squalid sex factory to the rural sweetness of her Tennessee home. A passionate reminder of the breathtaking misery of so many lives, and one woman’s work in their service.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52361-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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