Writing as an act of self-realization and liberation and, not incidentally, an indictment of the penal system.
The second accomplished collection of writings from women incarcerated in Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution, edited again by bestselling novelist Lamb (Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, 2003, etc.).
One would have thought the first volume, with its probing examinations of lives run amok, would have convinced prison authorities of the value of a writing program in which prisoners focus and take account. But the prison bureaucracy tried to shut it down, writes an incredulous and furious Lamb, and they confiscated the prisoners’ material. That particular draconian administration was replaced with a more enlightened group, Lamb reports, one that allowed for the rehabilitative value of writing. These works radiate what Lamb saw as the program’s critical mission: to give the women wings “to hover above the confounding maze of their lives, and from that perspective…to see the patterns and dead ends of their past, and a way out.” Some of the stories are rueful, others bitter, but all bite, even—perhaps especially—when they are gentle. None are self-pitying, but none shy away from speaking directly to the gross cruelties so often inflicted on their early years or young marriages. Each story, no matter how grim or gritty, shows polish, and the women display a wide array of emotions: unbridled anger, innocence, hope, resigned acceptance. While a few of the stories speak of angels who touched the women’s lives, most display open wounds that are continuing to be healed by the cathartic power of words.
Writing as an act of self-realization and liberation and, not incidentally, an indictment of the penal system.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-136922-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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