Poignant glimpses into the life of a survivor.
From memoirist and novelist Harrison (The Seal Wife, 2002, etc.), a collection of personal essays on love, longing, loss, and childhood.
Having revealed her incestuous relationship with her father in The Kiss (1997), the author here explores how her life was transformed by longing for her mother, who abandoned her early to the care of her grandparents. Mom left her behind, Harrison learned, as a replacement daughter, in essence using her as a hostage to buy her own freedom. Now a parent herself, Harrison writes from a safe distance of her mother and grandmother, the two women she loved, and of her own childhood. At age six, a transcendent experience in the arms of Christian Scientist practitioner made her believe that the spirit could conquer matter and that it was within her power to transform herself into an object worthy of her remote mother’s love. From this conclusion followed such self-destructive behavior as mortification of the flesh, bulimia, and shoplifting. Harrison’s childhood and youth were lonely times when she strained to be loved and, failing that, escaped into an interior landscape of her own creation. Yet her writing also contains humor: a vivid account of her grandmother’s passion for cats and their futile attempts to breed Himalayans at home, for example, and a delightful description of their misadventures at the DMV, where she twice helped her aging grandmother cheat to get her driver’s license renewed. Scenes from Harrison’s life as an adult show her working to be the kind of mother she never knew. Some depict quiet, introspective moments as she ponders the difference between her children’s lives and her own childhood; others are fraught with anxiety as she fights to protect them from the world’s evils, though the enemy may be merely a single blood-bloated tick or an invasion of recalcitrant head lice.
Poignant glimpses into the life of a survivor.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50558-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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