An enjoyably nostalgic scrapbook stocked full of memories from twins born into a political dynasty.
Fraternal twins and philanthropists Jenna (Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, 2007) and Barbara fondly portray the peaks and valleys of life carrying the Bush surname.
Determined to “de-emphasize that there was anything unduly special about being a Bush,” parents George and Laura protectively raised the authors with structure and honor. Jenna, named after her maternal grandmother, was more outspoken, a self-described “boundary pusher,” while Barbara remained thoughtful and pensive. Told in alternating narratives, the book honestly illuminates the experience of being a family member throughout the Bushes’ two generations of political prominence. Both women write vividly and affectionately about their differences and theorize that perhaps it was their “inborn duality” that made it easier for them to tolerate the random public assumptions made about their parents’ yin-and-yang personalities and proclivities. The sisters agree that in many ways, George’s boisterousness and penchant for reading and Laura’s “closet hippie and Rastafarian” ways mirrored Jenna’s melodramatic, emboldened recklessness and Barbara’s careful deliberations on life, love, and family. Both contribute an assortment of personal anecdotes about their time growing up in Midland, Texas, and the family lexicon, which had pet names for everyone. As young members of the Bush clan, each sister reflects on living through the presidencies of their grandfather and father, the tabloid media and general public scrutiny their family endured, details about the Secret Service and White House life (ghost stories included), and how some risky globe-trotting in their teens ultimately freed and matured them. Jenna bemoans her loss of anonymity as a charter school teacher during her father’s term, which placed her in the cross hairs of critical students, and she admits to an imprudent youth. The description of the crushing reality of their grandfather’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease is particularly heartbreaking, but the twins’ sisterly love is evident throughout.
An enjoyably nostalgic scrapbook stocked full of memories from twins born into a political dynasty.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1141-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 2024 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.
