Published at almost the same time as A Scott Berg’s materful biography of Lindbergh, a sweetly moving memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The novelist (The Names of the Mountains, 1992, etc.) is the youngest of five Lindbergh children, all born after the tragic kidnapping of the famous couple’s first-born son. Few knew the Lindberghs had such a large family, and that was how the family wanted to keep it. To escape publicity, they moved frequently, finally settling in an old stone house in Connecticut, where Reeve grew up after WWII. Her father traveled habitually, consulting for government and industry, but was a devoted—if domineering—parent when home, exercising “affection and discipline in equal measure, often at the same time.” Her mother was a quieter, less controlling presence; she wished to “heal, soothe, and uplift us.” Although Reeve learned little of her kidnapped brother, eventually she too lost a son when he was not yet two years old. Her mother sat with her by the little boy’s body, and together they mourned the lost babies. After Charles Lindbergh died nearly 25 years ago, Reeve sought him out again in his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minn., now a state park site. She reflected there on how to reconcile public and private images of famous parents, as well as on the man who taught his children that intolerance was “repellent and unspeakable”—yet who himself wrote and uttered anti-Semitic statements. Anne Lindbergh, now in her 90s, suffering from the aftereffects of stroke, often doesn’t recognize her daughter. Reeve writes about her mother’s illness with sorrow, anger, humor, and acceptance. She also remembers her grandmothers, her siblings—especially her sister, who died of cancer five years ago—and pleasant summers in Maine. An eloquent recollection of a happy childhood in a tightly knit family whose parents’ celebrity complicated but did not contort their lives.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80770-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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