“I was the luckiest woman in the world,” insists the author in this revelatory and deeply moving memoir that clearly shows...
From pity to empowerment, a woman who contracted polio as a baby illuminates her personal changes in attitude and accomplishment amid sweeping societal changes in rights for the disabled.
As a child in Sicily, LaSpina struggled with her family to understand the disease. Was it a sign of the family’s sin, and was she the cross they had to bear? Was it her destiny? If so, was she destined to be single and celibate? A nun or an old maid? Her father didn’t think so; he moved the family to America, hoping that better medical care would provide a miracle cure. The author found herself in hospitals with other children who had mobility issues and other diseases. She underwent a series of painful surgeries, intending to be able to walk and leave behind the wheelchair she had learned to love. Ultimately, she did walk, with braces and crutches, but she kept falling, breaking bones and complicating her life. She wanted to please her father, who had focused the family’s life and resources on enabling her to walk. Yet she was also becoming part of an activist movement that stressed acceptance and independence. Once feeling so insular, alone, and helpless, LaSpina, who created and taught courses in disability studies at the New School, began to feel “good to belong, to be part of something. I wasn’t sure what that something was, but I knew I wanted to be part of it.” Her memoir encompasses activism, civil disobedience, and legislation that would help move disability from the realm of disease requiring treatment (and eliciting pity) to respect, acceptance, and equal protection under the law. The author also addresses sexuality and romance, showing how she discovered that her life need not be limited as it once seemed destined to be.
“I was the luckiest woman in the world,” insists the author in this revelatory and deeply moving memoir that clearly shows how and why she came to feel that way.Pub Date: July 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61332-099-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New Village Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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