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LOOK UP FOR YES

The horrifying tale of a woman imprisoned in her own body. Tavalaro was a young wife and mother in 1966 when she suffered two strokes that sent her into a coma. Although she awoke soon after, the strokes had left her paralyzed from the neck down and unable to speak. Believed to be brain-dead, she was largely abandoned by her husband. The story of Tavalaro's six-year attempt to prove herself cognizant and to be treated as such is gripping and terrifying. With the little movement she was capable of, Tavalaro tried to gain the attention of her caregivers, mostly women who referred to her as ``the vegetable'' and brutalized her with their thoughtlessness and callous words. Finally, a speech therapist, Arlene Kraat, uncovered the hospital staff's mistake. Of course, the end of one nightmare was also the beginning of another. Still paralyzed and mute, Tavalaro struggled to learn how to communicate, to gain the freedom of an electric wheelchair fitted to her needs, and to create a life of sorts within the confines of her deformed body and the often inhospitable hospital. And she continues to fight for the basic respect she deserves for having overcome the harshest of obstacles while retaining her humanity throughout. But while Tavalaro's story is compelling, her chronicle of it—compiled with much help from poet and writing instructor Tayson—is not. It often seems like reminiscences tossed together, and while Tayson claims to have been true to the author's voice, there are many passages that the reader is hard-pressed to believe emerged from Tavalaro, the poor daughter of immigrant parents and a high-school dropout who never read much more than the occasional romance novel. Still, worthy for the powerful insight it gives into the lives of the disabled. (8 pages photos, not seen)

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-56836-171-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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