Given the autobiographical design of the collection, it may seem churlish to attack the book for going where the author so...
Memoirist and novelist Harrison (Creative Writing/Hunter Coll.; Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, 2014, etc.) again taps the well of her personal life for a series of essays dealing with long-standing preoccupations and compulsive navel-gazing, the result being an alternately compelling and uncomfortable reading experience.
While many readers will sympathize with the author, admiring her candor, courage, and flashes of excellent writing, these pieces will connect most strongly with readers as neurotic as she is—those prone to hand-wringing, crying jags, and obsessing, sometimes for decades, over the same, possibly unresolvable issues. For Harrison, writing is not merely catharsis, but dissection, a meticulous reading of the entrails of her experiences. Memory is the linchpin of the book, but the author is smart enough to know that memory is unreliable. In piece after piece, Harrison revisits (and re-evaluates) her anguish and confusion over her resentful young mother, a manipulative father (the author chronicled her incestuous relationship with him in The Kiss), her emotionally insatiable grandmother, the death of her much-loved father-in-law, and her fascination with Joan of Arc. The author also explores the joys of a happy marriage and the pleasures of raising three children, but it is the pain that lingers. Harrison is at her best in such essays as the moving “Mini-Me” and the incisive “The Forest of Memory,” while the title essay offers what is perhaps the most interesting weave: luridly macabre imagination twined with real-life experience.
Given the autobiographical design of the collection, it may seem churlish to attack the book for going where the author so often has gone before; yet Harrison is self-aware to the point of self-absorption and self-effacing to a fault. However, the author’s intelligence shines, and these ruminations may encourage some to confront their own anxieties.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6348-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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