A compassionate memoir of self-discovery.
A British-American journalist’s account of growing up the daughter of a fugitive father.
Until she was 9, Wetherall knew herself as Tyler Kane, the daughter of an American businessman and a former British model. Her family lived a peripatetic life that had taken them to “thirteen houses, five countries and two continents” before she was 10; yet Wetherall never saw these moves as odd. But when Scotland Yard detectives questioned her mother about a man they called Ben Glaser, the author suddenly realized that her entire life had been a lie. Everything—from her last name to the travels that had taken her family from California to Italy, Portugal, France, and Britain—had been ruses her father used to evade capture for criminal activity. Shuttling deftly between present and past, Wetherall pieces together the fragments of early years spent on the run to make sense of her life and her relationship to her fugitive father. She visited him in secret at hideouts in France and on the island of St. Lucia and came to know him as the man who had made his fortune smuggling marijuana from Thailand. Desperately confused, the author struggled to reconcile “the Dad who spent hours, years, teaching me how to swim, how to ski, [and] how to ride a bike” with the criminal sought by international authorities. Glaser was finally captured when the author was 12, and for the next several years, she visited him at the California prison where he served his sentence. Her unresolved rage toward her father wrought havoc with her teenage years. Eventually, she made peace with him, realizing that for all she had lost, she had regained both a father and a new perspective on a life story he had helped define. Revealing and emotionally nuanced, Wetherall’s book probes the dark underside of family relationships to uncover the meaning of acceptance and forgiveness.
A compassionate memoir of self-discovery.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11219-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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