A well-written, emotionally uplifting tale of friendships, extreme illnesses, and understanding what love truly means.
How sickness showed the author the full value of friendships and love.
When Fisher first met Allison, a woman 30 years her senior, she never imagined how life-changing that moment would be. “It was not love at first sight,” she writes. “Or second, or third, or even ninth. For the first year that we knew each other, all I could see was that she was different from me.” Eventually, they experienced the gradual development of a deep, loving bond that kept them close friends until Allison’s death from cancer. By that time, Fisher was experiencing her own health woes, including possible brain cancer and problems with mysterious mold and environmental issues. Allison’s patience and loving nature were the main factors in helping the author weather her illnesses, as she learned to let go of control so that the love and trust her friends provided her really sank in and made a difference in her life. Fisher shares her reflections and insights into these loving relationships—both platonic and sexual—as well as her battles with addiction in a deeply personal yet accessible manner; readers will experience the subtle changes along with her as the narrative progresses. Reflecting on the way Allison helped her change her outlook, she writes, “I had never been touched or held with a kind of pure and untrammeled love before, a love that wasn’t clouded by anxieties, or by sexual desire, or by the awkwardness of being in a young body that doesn’t know how to touch, or that—most important—didn’t request anything of me.” It is the revelation that love can be unconditional and profound that makes this memoir stand out from many similar ones. Fisher is not just another survivor of a grave illness; she has been transformed by letting another person love her without constraint.
A well-written, emotionally uplifting tale of friendships, extreme illnesses, and understanding what love truly means.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-544-99115-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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