Introspective and rich with personal revelation.
In her debut memoir, Mayfield (co-author: Ellie Hart Goes to Work, 2005, etc.) mines her 1960s rural Kentucky childhood as the daughter of a charismatic, alcoholic father who earned his living as an undertaker.
"The first time I touched a dead person," writes the author, "I was too short to reach into the casket." Her father lifted her up so she could get closer to the lifeless body, an experience she recalls as a "thrilling...unthinkable act." This dark and sharply detailed memoir follows the activities that took place in the author's Jubilee, Kentucky, girlhood home, which also served as the Mayfield and Son Funeral Home. There, she and her family members were cast as "the ghosts of the house," even as dead bodies came and went. She learned when to be quiet, out of respect for the deceased, and the rituals involved in preparing a corpse for burial. She was also preoccupied with obsessive thoughts about what objects the dead were buried with until, at last, she concluded that the most significant thing they possessed were their secrets. To that end, Mayfield offers up the long-held unspoken truths about her own family. This includes the darker side of her father, who served as his daughter's protector and hero while simultaneously battling his own demons of alcohol and infidelity. The author also explores the underbelly of their small, segregated town, which included suicide and violence and the ensuing familial feuds and grieving. Eventually, as she entered adolescence, Mayfield turned away from idolizing her father. Instead of adhering to the same parameters she had always followed, she longed to be free from the stifling world of the dead in order to live her own life—in this case, in London, where she lives with her British husband.
Introspective and rich with personal revelation.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476757285
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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