Poignant, creative, and unique.
A Man Booker International Prize–winning translator’s photo-illustrated memoir about how growing up meant growing away from the younger sister she loved.
Changing “names, identifying details, and places,” Croft tells the story of two sisters, Amy and Zoe, that draws on events from her own life. Elder sister Amy was in second grade when Zoe had the first of several seizures. Doctors concluded the episode stemmed from a mild concussion, but after another, more violent episode, scans revealed a tumor in Zoe’s brain. The girls’ parents home-schooled both girls, who developed a rivalry over Olympic ice skaters: Amy favored those from Russia and Zoe those from the Ukraine. When their father hired a Ukrainian-born tutor named Sasha to teach them the language of each girl’s respective favorite country, the girls suddenly found themselves vying for his attention. But as Amy uncovered her linguistic gifts, she also found herself falling in love with Sasha, who later killed himself. She began college shortly afterward at age 15, where she indulged her passion for both languages and photography. In the meantime, Zoe, now homebound, was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. Consumed by guilt for the misfortunes of both her sister and Sasha, Amy fixated on and then attempted suicide. After she graduated at 18, she left Oklahoma for Berlin, hoping to leave behind her troubled home and become “a whole new person.” Her travels, which she recorded in idiosyncratic photographs, took her all over Europe, where she experienced the epiphany at the heart of this book. Despite the apparent ease with which she moved between countries and languages, Amy’s truest desire was to “fix forever the presence of her sister [and] never let her go” in every photo she shot. Haunting and visually poetic, Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.
Poignant, creative, and unique.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-94-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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