In a memoir that is both funny and furious, tales of private and public adventure from a nationally known radio and TV reporter who is paralyzed from the chest down. Since an automobile accident nearly 20 years ago left Hockenberry a paraplegic, he has won national awards, including an Emmy, for his work as a journalist with National Public Radio and ABC-TV. In his wheelchair, he has reported from Somalia, Jerusalem during the intifada, and Kurdish camps on the border between Turkey and Iran following Desert Storm. He has ducked SCUD missiles in Israel and intrusive questions hurled at him by total strangers in public places. One flight attendant opened a conversation by asking, ``Have you ever thought about killing yourself?'' Her follow-up question: ``Are you able to do it with a woman?'' Hockenberry recounts a life that is full of triumph and humiliation, romance and harsh reality, inventive strategies and daily frustration. When he was studying to be a musician in college just after the accident, he invented a mouth-operated instrument that would let him control the pedals on his piano. But even his persistence hasn't found a resolution to the problem of finding a New York City taxi driver who will help him load his wheelchair in the trunk. Yet this is no simple chronicle of obstacles overcome. Hockenberry looks at himself, his family, and his surroundings with both detachment and empathy, finding kindness from Iranians even as they shouted ``Death to Americans'' and cruelty among his relatives, who buried an uncle in a mental institution for more than 30 years. He also reflects on America's disturbingly complacent view that ``normal'' is white, middle-class, and whole. Challenged and challenging, the author offers a self- portrait of a man in a wheelchair, neither hero nor poster boy, that should help to rattle stereotypes a little further. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6078-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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