Funny, moving and insightful.
In his debut memoir, Finch relates how the diagnosis of his autism-spectrum condition came as a relief because it helped explain his obsessive habits, extreme social unease and egocentricity.
What had before been understood as character flaws were instead traits and tendencies that were hardwired in his neurological makeup. Moreover, Finch came to understand that Asperger-related tendencies—e.g., a near-complete lack of empathy and the inability to adjust to changing schedules—were at the root of his strained relationship with his wife and his frustrations as a parent of two young children. “Receiving such a diagnosis as an adult might seem shocking and unsettling,” he writes. “It wasn’t. Eye-opening, yes. Life-changing, yes. But not upsetting in the least…the diagnosis ultimately changed my life for the better.” With an endearing and sometimes manic energy, Finch sought to better understand the needs of his family and plot how he could modify his behaviors in order to regain intimacy with them. To help him succeed, the author created the Journal of Best Practices, a hodgepodge collection of journal entries and random scraps of paper that record moments of personal insight such as “Parties are supposed to be fun” and “Laundry: Better to fold and put away than to take only what you need from the dryer.” With an alternately comical and starkly painful voice, Finch uses these and other moments of epiphany to explore the inroads of emotional intimacy.
Funny, moving and insightful.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8971-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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