A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.
In this sequel to the acclaimed Blackbird (2000), Lauck continues her disquieting, provocative memoir of a struggle to survive family treachery, abuse, and tragedy.
She picks up her story in 1975, when 11-year-old Jennifer and older brother Bryan are rescued by relatives from their cruel and capricious stepmother, Deb. Jennifer is sent to live with their dead father’s younger sister Peggy and her husband Dick in Black Sparks, Nevada. Aunt Peggy is a tightly wound woman subject to bursts of searing anger; Uncle Dick is a mean-spirited bully. Bryan, who has been taken in by Uncle Leonard and his wife Sylvia, an equally loathsome couple, now lives with them in Oklahoma. Jennifer tries to adjust to her new situation, as she helps out with baby Kimmy and does chores, but finds life little easier with Peggy and Dick than it was with Deb. The family moves to Washington State, where adolescent Jennifer finds her social life frequently limited by rigid strictures on socializing and by excessive work demands. She must call Dick Dad, and Peggy Mom, because they have officially adopted her. At the court hearing they promised to save Jennifer’s Social Security benefits so she could go to college, but when she graduates from high school, she learns they haven’t. She works two jobs while attending the local community college and moves out as soon as she can. But, despite her growing independence, a brief marriage, and a successful career as a journalist, she continues to be distressed by her troubled relationship with Bryan, who once claimed she made sexual advances to him. He enters a seminary, drops out, enrolls in college and then in 1984 commits suicide. By 2000, though happily remarried, Lauck decides to learn why Bryan killed himself, and in the search finds answers that explain and comfort.
A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-3965-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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