Still, this opens a window into the world of autism to provide an unforgettable view.
Revealing first-person account of what it is like to live with Asperger syndrome.
Although Prince-Hughes eventually managed to earn a Ph.D. despite her socially crippling disorder (a form of autism), she had a disastrous early life. She dropped out of high school and lived on the street, later earning her living as an exotic dancer. She attributes the turnaround in her life to the gorillas at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Unable to communicate or connect in any meaningful way with humans, the author began spending hours at the zoo silently watching a family of gorillas, closely observing their ways and their relationships with each other. She developed deep empathy with these primates, referred to here as “gorilla people” because in her view they fulfill all the criteria for personhood, serving as models of gentle care, protectiveness, acceptance, and love. Human emotions, long inexplicable to Prince-Hughes, became more understandable; she learned to relax in social situations and gradually had more success in human encounters. After a while she was hired by the zoo and resumed her education, eventually earning a doctorate in interdisciplinary anthropology. The author’s affinity with gorillas was great, and she came to see herself as a bridge between gorilla people and human people as well as between autistic people and normal people. By the end of her memoir, she has formed a loving relationship with another woman and together they are raising a son. Lest the reader assume that her Asperger syndrome has been vanquished, Prince-Hughes includes an epilogue detailing the huge difficulties that it still presents in her daily life. In a generally excellent debut, some of the author’s claims strain credulity: not all readers will believe that both she and her son recall the experience of being born, that she can understand the speech of a bonobo chimp, or that the gorilla Koko has recognized her as a fellow gorilla.
Still, this opens a window into the world of autism to provide an unforgettable view.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5058-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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