A different take on married life, of broader interest because of the issue of same-sex marriage and Mitt Romney's membership...
A behind-the-scenes look at the life of a celebrity polygamist family.
The authors, Kody Brown and his wives (Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn) tell their story sequentially, writing alternating chapters in each of the five parts. They begin with Kody's first (and only legal) marriage to Meri in 1990, and then describe how the couple brought the next two sister wives, Christine and Robyn into their family. This provides the back story to the real-life drama featured on their popular reality TV show, Sister Wives. After the first episodes aired, the family fled from Utah to Las Vegas to avoid threatened legal prosecution for bigamy. The authors explain that they are members of a Mormon sect that subscribes to all the tenets of the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—plus one more: “the principle of celestial plural marriage,” which is sanctified by a church ceremony. Readers hoping to find out more about the Mormon faith in general will be disappointed, and the authors are clear to distinguish their faith from that of the Fundamentalist LDS, which was led by convicted child molester Warren Jeffs. The authors do not explain the specific spiritual issues underlying their decision to embrace polygamy. They write movingly about their decision to reject the secrecy imposed on polygamous families, the new strains of their celebrity situation, the inevitable problems inherent in their marital situation, and the joys of raising 17 children. Sister Wives has finished its fourth season amid rumors of a fifth marriage and lawsuit against Utah by the family.
A different take on married life, of broader interest because of the issue of same-sex marriage and Mitt Romney's membership in the LDS.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6121-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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