Courageous and emotionally intense.
The follow-up to Calcaterra’s bestselling Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island (2013).
In her second book, the author teams up with her youngest sister, Maloney, to tell the story of their alcoholic and psychologically damaged mother, Cookie. Their two older sisters managed to leave the family through marriage or moving in with friends; Calcaterra sought legal emancipation at age 14. However, because Maloney and her brother, Norm, were still young children, they were forced to stay with Cookie, who “only wanted [them] for the welfare checks.” When she was “too busy” drinking and carousing to look after Maloney and her brother, the pair went into a foster care home, where they were abused. Cookie eventually kidnapped her children and took them to live with an assortment of men she picked up in bars or on the street. To escape legal problems and being “put in the slammer,” Cookie and her children left for Idaho. There they stayed with friends until Cookie was caught stealing from her hosts. Life only began to stabilize for Maloney and Norm after Cookie finally settled down with Clyde, the Mormon husband of another woman. As Maloney entered adolescence, she endured unwanted sexual advances from Clyde, more beatings from her mother, and virtual enslavement as a worker on the farm where they lived. School and the hope of reunion with her sisters, who did whatever they could to help, saved Maloney from a temporary slide into alcohol and drugs and occasional thoughts of suicide. In the end, she not only broke free of Cookie, but also found the happiness that had eluded her throughout her youth. As engrossing as Etched in Sand, this book is a testament to Maloney’s remarkable resilience and a moving tribute to the unbreakable bond of love she shared with her siblings.
Courageous and emotionally intense.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241258-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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