More an extended whine than a paean to pluck.
After memorably describing her journey from a Puerto Rican barrio to acceptance at a prestigious New York high school in When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998), the author now vividly recalls the long infatuation that put her life on hold in the ’70s.
As usual, Santiago writes well, but this latest memoir at times seems labored and overly self-absorbed. Though she is still nostalgic for Puerto Rico and her family, she seems quite nonchalant about keeping in touch. She is also quick to discern ethnic prejudice, though she has vast numbers of supportive Anglo friends and ultimately benefits from affirmative action. Fundamentally, her problem is more the usual one of loving the wrong man too much. Just 21, her dancing career on hold, she decides to move to Florida with Ulvi, a much older Turkish man. She knows her action will shock her mother, who, though never married herself, hopes her daughter will wed, but Santiago is too much in love to care. Ulvi remains a cipher: he has directed or produced (Santiago never really knows) a famous Turkish movie he now wants to distribute in the US and is going to Florida to raise funds. He never gets the money in the seven years of their relationship, though he makes countless mysterious trips and phone calls. He forbids Santiago to answer the phone, and she supports him when he goes back to graduate school in Texas and New York. While he studies, Santiago works, does his research, types his papers, and writes up his notes. Though he refuses to marry her, Ulvi is insanely jealous, dictating what she should wear and whom she should befriend. Santiago increasingly feels stifled, but only begins to liberate herself when a colleague suggests she apply to Harvard. She is accepted and slowly begins to reclaim her independence.
More an extended whine than a paean to pluck.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7382-0820-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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