Purportedly the writings of an autistic child who, when introduced to facilitated communication, revealed herself to be ``part angel, part seer.'' Jorde, the mother of young Adriana, is into spiritual growth, meditating, self-hypnosis, channeling, and past-life regression therapy; thus her fantastic claims about her daughter are not entirely surprising. It is she who tells Adri's story, and at the beginning it is an absorbing one. Part one is an account of the child's early years and of Jorde and her husband's struggle to discover what is wrong with their child and, after finally receiving a diagnosis when Adri is four, their search for ways to help her. Part Two, titled ``Emergence,'' is something entirely different. It is Jorde's journal from March to September 1991, in which she describes and records many facilitated communication sessions with her nine-year-old dughter. Jorde acknowledges that this technique (in which the autistic person's hand is physically supported and guided at a keyboard by someone else) is controversial but dismisses skeptics. Adri relates that she has lived previous lives, knew Jesus, and in fact was his disciple John, that Cleopatra and Xerxes put a curse on her, that she is actually a powerful spiritual master named Pompeii, and that Jorde must listen to her spiritual guides, especially Mohammed. In Part Three, Jorde stretches credulity further by describing Adri's telepathic and telekinetic skillsshe is able to type words on her keyboard and turn her radio off and on while at a distance from these devices. Jorde concludes by quoting many of Adri's so-called messages about love, healing, God, truth, and mankind's future. Reminiscent of Birger Sellin's I Don't Want To Be Inside Me Anymore (p. 149), which was presented as the work of a talented young autistic man whose mother acted as his communication facilitator, but if possible, even less credible. (First printing of 100,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38945-X
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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