A highly satisfying look at a flawed family, a conflicted South, and a fraught future.
The Mississippi blues take on new meaning in this tragic yet uplifting memoir.
With its Southern setting and themes of racial conflict and civil rights, it’s easy to see how this book has been compared to The Help. But Clark’s debut is an entirely original—and true—story. In the Grammy Award–winning songwriter and producer’s memoir, she reveals a Southern gothic tale of growing up in 1950s Waynesboro, Mississippi, a lesbian raised by a womanizing father, an alcoholic mother, and a household of African-American help whom she’d sooner call family. Long before the author went on to become a renowned music producer, she was a little girl trying to make sense of her confusing world on the cusp of integration. The youngest daughter of four, Clark was the only one in the house by the time her parents had reached the height of their fisticuffs. The daughter of the wealthiest man in town, Clark watched her father’s adultery in action. “On any given day,” she writes, “Daddy would cruise around town, admiring his own image in his Cadillac’s rearview mirror, his left arm dangling out the window, a cigarette between his fingers. When he wasn’t entertaining some woman in his car, he and I would tool around town, making his daily rounds.” His womanizing drove Clark’s mother not only to drink, but to shoot, and the author saw her mother, on more than one occasion, take aim at her father. But this isn’t merely a story of parental dysfunction. The narrative is an investigation of what it meant to be a progressive during the Jim Crow era. Clark openly mocked Klan members, took her black nanny to lunch days after the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and tested her own family’s acceptance by marrying a woman. Yet throughout the book, the overarching theme is love.
A highly satisfying look at a flawed family, a conflicted South, and a fraught future.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6794-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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