The third revealing volume in an ongoing autobiographical series that is beginning to take on the breathtaking quality of a thriller: Will Donna Williams find her real self? Will she and Ian build a life together? Will she reunite with her family? Williams, diagnosed as autistic, began her chain of memoirs (Nobody Nowhere, 1992) by offering herself as Exhibit A in an exploration of what it is like to be a person with autistic symptoms. For instance, like many other ``high-functioning'' autistics, she was unable to express or even feel emotions like anger or affection, and only mimed acceptable social behavior. Frequently overwhelmed by sensation—light, sound, touch—she would become confused, immobilized, at the most inopportune times, such as when crossing a busy street. Somebody Somewhere (1994) followed her struggles to reengage with the ``real'' world. More and more able to control disruptive flights of consciousness and ritualistic behavior, Williams moved on to replace false selves with real feelings. In this new work she describes her relationship with Ian, someone ``like me,'' who became her friend and then her husband. Together they worked to peel away the masks they had created to hide themselves from the world. Living together in an English cottage, they developed a system of ``checking'' each other. Were the choices they made- -about, for instance, what to have for breakfast—true choices, or simply the fulfillment of images imposed by parents, or television, or an indefinable ``should''? Together they came closer to understanding the feelings that other people call ``love.'' Williams's gift for metaphor, and her ability to render experience and feeling with a compelling clarity, open her world to a group of readers much larger than just those interested in autism. Sadly, Donna and Ian part, but they shared ``the heaven and hell which is the stuff of growth and development.'' What comes next? Readers are likely to be waiting impatiently for volume four of this extraordinary narrative.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2640-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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