A French mother’s lyrical and haunting memoir of the deaths of her two young daughters and how she has coped with this terrible loss. In 1980 Jurgensen’s daughters, Mathilde (age 7) and Elise (age 4), were killed by a drunk driver. How does one live with the pain and grief of surviving one’s children? How does one express this loss and love in words? The Disappearance is Jurgensen’s unsentimental and candid response to these questions. In a series of letters to a friend written from 1991 to 1993, the author draws an intimate portrait of her life before and after her daughters’ deaths. The epistolary approach serves Jurgensen well, eliciting honest emotions and a lean lyricism. Slowly and sensitively she introduces us to the facts of the tragic accident. We learn about her own reaction to the girls’ deaths and how she managed to continue her life, and about her loving relationship with her husband, Laurent, which helps sustain her in times of deep depression and grief. Jurgensen’s pain is palpable and her book is at times too sad to read without setting it down. One of the most compelling aspects of Jurgensen’s story is how the two dead daughters have remained a presence in the family, even as the family grew with the addition of two subsequent children. From innocent questions about family size to her two younger children’s inquiries and formulations about their “older” siblings, Jurgensen candidly discusses her emotional and rational responses to both strangers and loved ones about her first two daughters. We celebrate with her when an old acquaintance who knew the girls comments when seeing the younger two: “they are so, so alike all four of them.” Jurgensen’s is a powerful voice for the unbearable sadness caused by death and the courage and love it takes to live with both the pain of loss and the cherished memories.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04776-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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 2025 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.
