A loving remembrance told with humor and cheer.
One woman’s sentimental memoir about her colorful mother.
Debut author Radford writes that she found herself often quoting her voluble mom, Margery, so she began to catalog all the “Margeryisms” she could recall as a kind of linguistic homage. Those scattershot remembrances form the basis of this memoir—a portrait in short essays. Radford’s parents moved to Troon, a small town on the western coast of Scotland, sometime in the mid-1950s; the family moved often within that town—eight times—and many of the author’s recollections take place there. Her mother was truly eccentric; she would cook beef heart for the dog, for example, or free a pet hamster so that he could be properly “fulfilled.” She was also a natural raconteur with a gift for turning beautifully polished, if peculiar, phrases. Once, when asked if she had enough to eat, she replied, “I have had an elegant sufficiency. Any more would be sheer gluttony on my part.” Some of her coinages were more obscure: when she expressed exuberant joy, for instance, she might exclaim, “bonnets over the windmill,” although it was never precisely clear why. And once, when asked why a previous engagement didn’t work out, she cryptically replied, “All cats are grey in the dark.” Of course, there’s much more to the author’s mother than her amusing theatricality, and what emerges here is a full picture of a playful, loving woman with a gimlet eye. The book has an impressionistic structure; some essays are very brief, like a snapshot, but collectively, they treat readers to the full arc of the author’s life with her parents, from her early years to her adulthood in the United States, where she pursued her medical studies. Like her mother, Radford herself has a flair for memorable description, and her prose is clear, quick-witted, and often tenderly nostalgic—no surprise from an author who still keeps a locket of hair from her childhood dog. Overall, this is a beautiful chronicle, touching, amusing, and unabashedly grateful.
A loving remembrance told with humor and cheer.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5258-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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