A raw, somber emotional journey that concludes with hope and a measure of forgiveness.
Drawing on letters and newspaper articles, former writing instructor and political advocate Moran re-creates her personal history and the events leading up to Sept. 11, 1976, when Croatian freedom fighters launched a terrorist attack in New York City that killed her husband.
In this moving memoir, the author recalls the panic gripping her as Walter Cronkite delivered the report of a Chicago-bound flight that had been hijacked by Zvonko and Julie Busic, a Croatian man and his American wife. The lockers at Grand Central subway station had also been bombed, and Moran’s husband, Brian, a member of the NYPD bomb squad, perished when the explosive suddenly detonated. The author provides details of life growing up in the late-1960s South Bronx with seven brothers and sisters, several of whom were physically abusive or drug-addled, an abusive father, and an elusive mother who raised her children with resentment. The evolution of her seven-year romance with Brian also resonates throughout. Moran recalls meeting the recently discharged Air Force serviceman when she was 21, and she was instantly intrigued and attracted after his bold declaration that they would be married someday. The author delicately yet unreservedly explores a widow’s experience: the necessary yet near-impossible task of reconciling a senseless death to a terrorist organization, the unanswered questions and insecurity, and the crushing reality of suddenly becoming a single parent to small children. The estrangement between Moran and her drug-addicted sister Gracie added further sorrow to her life, though she achieved a measure of closure from discovering exactly how her husband died and meticulously researching the hijackers, who were members of the Fighters for Free Croatia terrorist movement. In the closing chapters, the author delivers some engaging revelations. She remarried and, unable to reconcile the details of Brian’s death, filed a lawsuit against New York for gross negligence, which was eventually dismissed. She also began correspondence with one of the hijackers, who sought atonement and a chance to “unload emotionally.”
A raw, somber emotional journey that concludes with hope and a measure of forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-32-4
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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