"; if(is_file("header.php")) include "header.php"; else include "../header.php"; ?>

Angela's Ashes , only much worse - it's America This detailed memoir takes us into the squalid and unsettling world of two total whack-jobs who unfortunately produced four kids. Gleefully "excitment addicted" mom comprehensively and unbelievably ignores her small children, placing them in harms way time and again by her complete disregard for their basic safety. She gaily mono-functions as a co-dependent cheerleader for her delusional,horribly alcoholic husband. The most fascinating parts of this memoir for me were reading the mom's incredible takes on parenting. She would utter the most amazingly twisted justifications for her nearly abusive uncaring, yet if you enter her mental world, her "position" on "parenting" (i.e. abusive disregard) was somehow justified in some bizarre way in her own mind. You cannot accurately call her uncaring or unloving. The twisted logic, stemming from deep rejection of anything conventional as she was "an artist", was fascinating and horrifying, a train wreck I couldn't turn from. These poor children - yet does "what does not kill you" really make you stronger? I would have loved the author's opinion on this. This leads to the other dismaying aspect of this book, for me, which was that after experiencing such a horrific childhood and adolescence, Jeannette Walls really does not give us her point of view on any of it. Though I can appreciate the horrible ride through her childhood she had to endure to simply recount this story, I felt more than a little ripped off as the reader. Here I am reading, asked to go the unsettling distance through the squalid and disgusting, the scary and appalling with these children over and over, hanging on and always hoping for a turn for the best for these bright, polite, and incredibly resourceful kids - but in the end, nothing! The reader never gets the benefit of her point of view about any of it. How does she now existentially or pragmatically see that hellish existance? what are her views of her parents? of child abuse? of how our society responds to the homeless and the incredibly impoverished? She has very valuable insights, and I feel we have been deprived of them in the "just the facts" sort of retelling we have here. Though we see glimpses of her inner feelings in a couple of lines of text on literally the first and last pages, that is it. I hope, now that the table has been set and the meal laid out plain and simple, she'll digest some of this and give us the benefits of her viewpoints in another volume.