Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Walsh (Sammy in the Sky, 2011) explores the ties that bound her own family despite death and desertion.
The author writes about the almost mythic heroism of her ancestors, tough, hard-drinking fishermen who had emigrated from Ireland to Marystown, Newfoundland. They battled fierce storms to put food on the table for their families and looked out for each other in this small community where most of the people who lived there were related. The author begins in August 1935, with the birth of her father in Brooklyn—her grandfather had come to the United States a decade earlier—which coincided with the death of more than 40 Marystown fisherman in a devastating hurricane. This is a complex tale that began for the author in 2002, when her father suggested that she write about the storm and revealed secrets about his own family history that he had found too painful to discuss before. When he was 11 years old, her father had abandoned his family, leaving his mother in dire poverty with two children to raise alone. The author learned that along with five sisters, she had American cousins whom she'd never met, and others living in Newfoundland. Walsh uses her journalistic skills to re-create the life of the Newfoundland fishing community before the gale; she recounts events during the storm and the struggle of the women and children who survived the tragedy. She and her father establish contact with his father's half-siblings and their relatives in Marystown, and she recognizes physical traits and mannerisms they hold in common. The eponymous storm provides the thread that holds the story together and serves as a metaphor for her father's stormy childhood. A celebration of traditional family values and reconciliation.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6146-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
