A fetching, straightforward account of the struggles and successes of a respected radio personality. Rehm, host of an eponymous National Public Radio show, offers an intimate look into her childhood, marriage, career, and battle with a rare neurological disorder that has affected her speech and thus nearly destroyed her career. Scarred by a vitriolic mother who disciplined her both physically and with icy silence, Rehm suffered from low self-esteem and guilt. Raised in a traditional Arab-American household to be a dutiful mother and wife, she broke out of a brief, disappointing marriage and sought more independence in a second one. Motherhood besieged her with loneliness and overwhelming responsibility. While her husband was absorbed in his State Department work, Rehm found solace in playing the piano, sewing, and gardening. It was only when she volunteered at a local radio station that she blossomed and filled the intellectual void in her life. Eventually landing a job as a talk-show host, Rehm both found her voice and got to interview major figures like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Carl Sagan. Ironically, at the height of her career, she had to flit from doctor to doctor desperately seeking to identify the mysterious affliction ruining her voice. When it was finally diagnosed and treated, heroic rehabilitation work was required. Returning to host her show after months of absence, Rehm became a national spokesperson for spasmodic dysphonia, contending that her disability has given added meaning to her life. Now 62, she anticipates that an aging population “will welcome more mature voices on the air.” Though Rehm attributes her present emotional well-being and professional success largely to years of therapy, credit must be given to her sheer determination and intellectual vigor, readily evident here. Told with honesty and simplicity. An articulate and inspirational travelogue of one woman’s remarkable journey. (8 pages photos) (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40163-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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