Gentle words of wisdom from a woman driven by "senseless, relentless hope.”
A wife and mother's reflections on being imperfect and loving it.
When people from her church started telling blogger and momastery.com founder Melton that she and her family seemed so "perfect," she was dismayed. Rather than continue to let others believe that she led a trouble-free life, the author decided to become "a reckless truth-teller." In a memoir that is also an inspirational guide to daily living, Melton tells the story of how she learned to carry on through the inevitable trials of living "without armor and without weapons.” For two decades, she writes, "I was lost to food and booze and bad love and drugs." Her problems with alcohol and drugs led to arrests, a criminal record and difficulties getting a job. Although she was happily married, Melton's relationship with her husband had begun as a result of "confusing sex with love, and [winding] up pregnant." Then one day she was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Melton credits a deep faith in God as well as strong connections with her family as being the cornerstones of her personal success. But as with everything else, learning to make those relationships work was a daily challenge. As a wife, Melton had to be willing to not only understand her husband's needs, but be honest about her own and find effective ways to communicate them. As a mother, she had to learn to forgive herself for allowing her anxieties "to pour out like gasoline on [the] raging fire" of her children's tantrums and other difficult behaviors. Only by living in a state of loving vulnerability would she be able to do what she desired most: touch others and be touched by them in return.
Gentle words of wisdom from a woman driven by "senseless, relentless hope.”Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9724-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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