Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow...
A gripping portrayal of how the lives of a wife and her husband were forever changed when the husband incurred permanent brain damage.
Feminist author Shulman (A Good Enough Daughter, 1999, etc.)—a fiercely independent woman whose marriage was based on autonomy and freedom and for whom privacy and time for her writing were paramount—was suddenly deprived of both when her husband Scott’s traumatic brain injury left him dependent and demented, yet still loving and lovable. Within the details of the accident and the aftermath—a ten-foot fall in the middle of the night on a small island off the coast of Maine, his rescue, his subsequent time in hospitals and rehab and his return home—the author interweaves the story of their unusual romance. It began with a teenage crush in 1950, followed by a 34-year hiatus in which each married, had children and divorced (she twice). Their relationship resumed in 1984, and by the time of the accident they had been together for some 20 years. Her early misunderstanding of the doctors’ prognosis—she thought he would return to normal in one year—was gradually replaced by the stark realization that while physical improvements in strength and mobility were possible, his mental capacities, including his short-term memory, were gone. How she dealt with this shattering knowledge and managed his care, as well as how their relationship changed, comprise the core of this compelling love story. Although she rejoiced in his small triumphs and basked in his warmth and charm, the author includes the frightening episodes when he disappeared or became so hostile and violent that she called the police.
Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow reassuring.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-27815-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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