A memoir of potentially broad appeal muffled by theoretical material: the latter belongs in another book.
Reflections on fame by a woman who witnessed its effects on her parents, lived in its shadow for many years, and then studied it as a psychological phenomenon.
Erik H. Erikson’s book Childhood and Society (1950) made him a celebrity when his daughter was 13. Young Sue was uneasily aware that the public image of her parents as an exceptionally gifted couple with valuable insights into human relationships was at odds with her experience of them as real, tormented people with unresolved issues. The most painful of these concerned the Down syndrome baby her mother gave birth to when the author was five. He was immediately placed in an institution, but her parents told her the baby had died, and she did not learn the truth for eight years. This abandoned, handicapped child, Bloland believes, was the emotional centerpiece of Erikson family life. The appearance of normality was essential to her father’s professional reputation; she was instructed never to misbehave in public, never to act in any way that might indicate that her parents were other than ideal. The author was well into adulthood before she understood the harmful effects of such stultification on her own sense of self-worth. In addition to recounting what it was like growing up in such a household, Bloland delves into her parents’ pasts, finding in their early experiences of parental rejection the explanation for their overwhelming need to be admired by others and to achieve fame. In time, as Boland underwent psychoanalysis and trained to become a psychotherapist, she concluded that a paradoxical relationship always exists between an idealized public image and the private self. As a professional, she decided to focus her attention on issues related to fame, the drives associated with it, and its emotional fallout. Her thoughts on those matters make up the later chapters, which are likely to be of interest primarily to other mental-health professionals.
A memoir of potentially broad appeal muffled by theoretical material: the latter belongs in another book.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03374-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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