A welcome addition to the expanding literature about coming-of-age in Appalachia.
A family memoir that celebrates the inspiration of strong women within a rural culture most often characterized as patriarchal.
Chambers, a member of the Democratic National Committee, knows how fortunate she was to experience the world beyond her Appalachian home in Kentucky and, especially, to graduate from Yale and Harvard Law. Yet she could not have done so without the examples of her mother, the first in her family to graduate from high school as well as college, and her grandmother. “I don’t have enough ways to honor them, these women of the Appalachian hills,” she writes. “Women who built a support system for me and the others. The best way I know is to tell their stories.” Chambers provides information about Appalachia in general, including the poverty and lack of resources, the collapse of the coal and tobacco industries, and the drug epidemics that have decimated the region. There are also stories that illuminate the hardworking spirit and flashes of hope among the populace, the women in particular. People in these communities supported each other because they knew that no one else would; “generosity was both an insurance policy and a deeply held value.” But the primary story is personal, as the author chronicles how she left home to discover a world of privilege amid the privileged. After graduating from Yale, she had “figured out the system, the code, the secret password into this world that had seemed so mysterious for so long….But…as I fit in more at Yale, I fit in less in the mountains. I didn’t know how to be both of these people at the same time.” The various narrative strands come together as Chambers returns home to provide legal aid to those who can’t afford it. She relates the stories of women battling poverty, domestic violence, drug habits, and other ills that run rampant throughout the region. Ultimately, it was home in Kentucky that she found her purpose, identity, and voice.
A welcome addition to the expanding literature about coming-of-age in Appalachia.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984818-91-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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