Like the author’s previous examination of her relationship with her father (The Kiss, 1997): a dark ride taken with terrible...
The time has come to let her mother go, realizes novelist Harrison (The Seal Wife, 2002, etc.), who here delineates, in very short form, her wrenching journey to that emotional, stabbing moment.
After her third child was born and she had a tubal ligation, the author felt some sadness, knowing she would have no more children. But the sadness gradually took a plunge into depression, sparked by the decision to stop nursing her daughter and her son’s sudden onset of severe asthma. “I’d . . . relinquished that cherished perception of myself as my children's primal source of sustenance and love,” Harrison writes. She thought of herself as an agent of corruption, passing on her own childhood asthma to her son; more to the point, she feared she was hurtful to her children as her mother had been to her. Throughout her life, Harrison suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia, and anorexia, disorders that could be tracked without much effort right back to her mother’s treatment and eventual abandonment of her. Harrison recounts with grimness and grace making the painful connections: she loved breast-feeding partly because “I intended for my body to accuse my mother, testify to my having given the pound of flesh she’d withheld”; anorexia was both fulfillment of and vengeance for the knowledge that she had been an unwanted baby—“If she wants me dead . . . then I’ll do it for her . . . it wouldn’t be that she’d taken back the life she gave me, but that I had taken it away from her.” Her internist and analyst helped the author deal with her demons and spare her family; she ultimately decided to disinter her mother’s body and have it cremated. “It didn’t feel bearable—letting my mother go without having had her,” she acknowledges, but this unbearable act of survival was also necessary and healing.
Like the author’s previous examination of her relationship with her father (The Kiss, 1997): a dark ride taken with terrible clarity into the heart of misery, scorched to a luster.Pub Date: June 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6191-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
