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FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH

A MEMOIR

A moving memoir that flows like the best fiction but that has the punch of real life.

Trussoni’s debut is an engaging coming-of-age memoir that has at its core a stark portrait of her war-damaged father.

When her parents separated, Trussoni, then 11, chose to stay with her father. Here, she expertly weaves together three separate stories—the first is of her early years growing up in a dysfunctional family and then living with her hard-drinking, often distant father; the second is of her father’s life-altering experiences as a “tunnel rat” during the Vietnam War; and the third is of her solo trip to Vietnam at age 24, a journey she took to try to fathom her father’s wartime life. It is a rich vein of material, and her handling of it is deft. As depicted here, her father’s behavior is both sad and funny, outrageous and shocking. As a child, she favored him, preferring to share his life rather than live with her mother, sister and brother under the parents’ joint-custody arrangement. However, she does not spare him here. Her clear-eyed narrative shows him to be a man with a chip on his shoulder, hanging out at Roscoe’s bar, neglecting her, bringing home slews of girlfriends and talking with his fists. It is not surprising that she has her own teenage run-ins with the law. At age 16, she rejoins her mother and siblings. Somehow she survives her disjointed childhood, and even thrives, growing up to confront her father, to question and to understand him. On her trip to Vietnam, she goes into the tunnels that it was his job to search during his stint there in the late ’60s. Clearing booby-trapped tunnels was a suicide mission for American soldiers, and Trussoni writes of the job—the smells, the heat, the danger, the fear, the killings—as though she had lived it. Her father’s memories have become her virtual memories, and clearly the war that changed her father has had its effects on her life, too.

A moving memoir that flows like the best fiction but that has the punch of real life.

Pub Date: March 6, 2006

ISBN: 0-8050-7732-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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