An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.
An immigrant struggles with health and employment issues before finding hope in her faith.
Born and raised with six siblings in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, debut author Edwards and her family immigrated to New York in the mid 1980s in search of prosperity. Instead, her educated parents, who were soundly middle class in Guyana, found themselves working menial jobs as nannies and security guards—a cycle of underemployment that Edwards herself would confront after graduating from college and moving to Atlanta. For years, she would seek a job as a copy editor to no avail: “Surely, I was qualified and skilled to work in my field, but somehow nothing opened up.” Edwards soon set her mind to moving to Florida, but before she could actualize her vision of a sunnier, happier existence as a teacher, she found a lump in her left breast. Without health insurance, she sought local clinics to have a lumpectomy but went more than a year with no follow-up visits. Although she created a new life in Florida, it was marred by horrible students and a cancer that had spread through her bones. By the book’s end, Edwards discovers support and relief in her Christian faith, but her story always returns to the many disappointments she suffered in the United States. “The rules of the game had changed,” she writes of the American dream, “and I evidently never got an update.” The theme of an immigrant’s plans becoming derailed by timely social issues like health insurance and hiring freezes should resonate strongly with readers. But Edwards never fleshes out her recollection. It remains unclear if she intends her story to be an American tragedy or a Christian tale of triumph filled with traumatic elements. Her tendency to use verbose, academic language also gets in the way of clarifying her objective (“I considered the entrapment of being in a cultural dichotomy where younger immigrants contended with the dissonance of living through our parents’ worldview or adopting that of the new world”). In addition, truly upsetting moments—like her decision to shrug off the cancer destroying her body or the sudden, unexplained death of her brother—certainly don’t help to guide this memoir, which is in great need of a clearer direction.
An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1269-8
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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