The Glass Castle A Memoir (Paperback)
| Author: Jeannette Walls |
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Product Details:
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 074324754X
ISBN-13: 9780743247542
Sku: 31282240
Publish Date: 1/9/2006
Sales Rank: 4623
Pages:
288
Age Range:
NA
See more in Personal Memoirs
| In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and severely misguided family. |
Annotation:
Jeannette Walls's memoir revolves around her parents, who give the concept of bad parenting a whole new meaning. Her irresponsible romantic of a father was an inventor of outlandishly useless devices, and her mother, an artist, was his abettor. As the two of them dragged the family around the country on the run from creditors and from one bad idea to another, they virtually ignored their four hapless children, except when they were giving them shoplifting lessons or stealing their money for booze. Walls writes about these years with a hardheaded, clear-eyed acceptance and very little recrimination, and she doesn't neglect her parents' virtues, which she manages to wrest out of the slag heap: their values were both generous and idealistic, they produced self-reliant children, and they were true originals.
Jeannette Walls's memoir revolves around her parents, who give the concept of bad parenting a whole new meaning. Her irresponsible romantic of a father was an inventor of outlandishly useless devices, and her mother, an artist, was his abettor. As the two of them dragged the family around the country on the run from creditors and from one bad idea to another, they virtually ignored their four hapless children, except when they were giving them shoplifting lessons or stealing their money for booze. Walls writes about these years with a hardheaded, clear-eyed acceptance and very little recrimination, and she doesn't neglect her parents' virtues, which she manages to wrest out of the slag heap: their values were both generous and idealistic, they produced self-reliant children, and they were true originals.
Praise
Times Literary Supplement
"[A] remarkably dispassionate account which, precisely because of the detachment of its prose, is also extraordinarily moving. Jeannette Walls's parents here join a distinguished roster of memorable monsters." - Andrew Rosenheim 10/07/2005 Newsweek
"What saves this book from mind-numbing grimness is the family's extraordinary resilience. You'll root for them." - Barbara Kantrowitz 03/07/2005 Kirkus Reviews
"An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the '60s and '70s....A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story." 12/15/2004 New York Times Book Review
"The memoir offers a catalog of nightmares that the Walls children were encouraged to see as comic or thrilling episodes in the family romance....Walls has a telling memory for detail and an appealing, unadorned style. And there's something admirable about her refusal to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, to descend to the jargon of dysfunction....But what's best is the deceptive ease with which she makes us see just how she and her siblings were convinced that their turbulent life was a glorious adventure....Walls is notably evenhanded and unjudging....THE GLASS CASTLE falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir." - Francine Prose 03/13/2005
"[A] remarkably dispassionate account which, precisely because of the detachment of its prose, is also extraordinarily moving. Jeannette Walls's parents here join a distinguished roster of memorable monsters." - Andrew Rosenheim 10/07/2005 Newsweek
"What saves this book from mind-numbing grimness is the family's extraordinary resilience. You'll root for them." - Barbara Kantrowitz 03/07/2005 Kirkus Reviews
"An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the '60s and '70s....A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story." 12/15/2004 New York Times Book Review
"The memoir offers a catalog of nightmares that the Walls children were encouraged to see as comic or thrilling episodes in the family romance....Walls has a telling memory for detail and an appealing, unadorned style. And there's something admirable about her refusal to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, to descend to the jargon of dysfunction....But what's best is the deceptive ease with which she makes us see just how she and her siblings were convinced that their turbulent life was a glorious adventure....Walls is notably evenhanded and unjudging....THE GLASS CASTLE falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir." - Francine Prose 03/13/2005
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