A fierce and unsentimental book that stands eloquent testament to the high price that women of a certain generation had to...
In this quietly probing memoir, Blew (English/Univ. of Idaho; Jackalope Dreams, 2008, etc.) chronicles how she tried to escape her rural Montana roots as a young adult, only to be unexpectedly “called home” by an academic job that would both liberate and entrap her.
The great granddaughter of “one of the earliest homesteaders in central Montana,” the author had toughness in her blood. However, she was determined to leave ranch country and make something of herself. Education was her way out, but as a young married woman in the 1950s, social expectations forced her to walk a thin line between family and personal ambition. Nevertheless, with two babies and a husband in tow, she earned a doctorate in English. While not the simple teaching certificate demanded by the maternal side of her family, her degrees promised a self-sufficiency that aligned, albeit uneasily, with her mother and grandmother’s vision for her. Blew eventually found work at a small Montana college where, as a young assistant professor, she came face-to-face with the reality of just how hard she would have to fight to fulfill her ambitions. Not only did she find herself at violent odds with a husband unable to cope with having a professional wife; she also got caught in a sexually charged game of cat and mouse with the college president that cost the unyielding Blew her job. The author eventually found much-deserved success as a scholar and writer at Idaho.
A fierce and unsentimental book that stands eloquent testament to the high price that women of a certain generation had to pay to pursue their dreams.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3011-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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