A poignant memoir that thoughtfully examines a set of difficult and unique family relationships.
A young woman’s account of how a dysfunctional family situation caused her to become separated from her six siblings but how all seven still managed to reconnect.
New Jersey native King was the second-oldest child of working-class parents “whose passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again.” By the time her fourth sibling was born, her father began actively disappearing. Strapped for cash, the author’s mother put her third child, Becky Jo, in the care of her parents in Oklahoma. From that moment on, life in the King household followed a predictable pattern: the father would return temporarily, then leave his wife pregnant with another child who would get adopted as soon as it was born. When King’s parents finally divorced, they decided to send both King and her elder brother to join Becky Jo in Oklahoma. A Yankee girl in a place where it seemed the natives thought “the Civil War [was] still going on,” King gradually—though uneasily—settled into the life thrust upon her. She eventually accepted a name change and became the family golden child. Yet she never forgot the brother whom her grandfather, in a fit of rage, sent back to New Jersey for misbehavior, nor could she forget about the siblings she had never met. King returned to New York for college, preparing for the day she would meet the siblings she knew would come looking for her. She desired to be “a person worth finding, worth keeping.” As King made peace with her parents, each of the children, all girls, who had been adopted found her. Working together, the author and her siblings then began the difficult task of reclaiming the familial ties that had been denied them. King not only explores the impact of disrupted relationships; she also eloquently probes the meaning of both love and human connectedness.
A poignant memoir that thoughtfully examines a set of difficult and unique family relationships.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08861-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
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.
