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MY SISTER LIFE

THE STORY OF MY SISTER'S DISAPPEARANCE

A retelling of the lives of two sisters, separated as young teenagers when each was caught in an undertow of drugs, prostitution, and mental institutions. But award-winning novelist Flook (You Have the Wrong Man, 1996, etc.), the younger of the sisters, seems to miss the point: This is a fairy tale, the story of Snow White and Rose Red, of a narcissistic (wicked queen) mother and a helpless (king) father. Rose Red (sister Karen) flees into the forest when she is only 14 with her almost-50-year-old lover. Karen begins her new life by pasting thousands of stolen Green Stamps into books to trade for merchandise she can sell. Pretty soon, she's trading her own body for cash that she hides in a hollowed-out Bible. Her Snow White sister, 12-year-old Maria, left behind, is obsessed with her loss of Karen—and also with her mother's various cruelties. Mother Veronica, a Vivian Leigh look-alike but ``more sultry,'' made her husband her priority, flirted often and obviously with other men, and faithfully tuned out her children. Father Ray, who might have reversed the family's downward spiral, foolishly stayed true to his wife even when his daughters began disappearing into psychiatric wards. As a writer, Flook shadows her sister's life, recording poignant and (literally) pregnant moments. Their babies are born at close to the same time; their mates stalk them similarly. Karen escapes from her man by jumping down two stories from a fire escape with her baby in her arms; Maria escapes from hers when Karen bashes him with a can of drain cleaner. Twenty years later, they both have new husbands, new children, and a fresh perspective on their mother, now a widow in an upscale retirement castle. Flook's book should sing with pain, but it's strangely flat, if skillfully written—the reflections of her reflections, minus the power of myth.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998

ISBN: 0-679-44208-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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