Despite a promising premise and a few fascinating stories, the book is ill-focused and overlong.
Psychiatrist Holland recounts nine years working the weekend shift in the emergency room of one of the nation’s iconic psychiatric hospitals.
When she started her job at the Bellevue psych ER, 30-year-old Holland (editor: Ecstasy: The Complete Guide, 2001) was single, intelligent and tough. Prisoners in chains, battered women, the homeless, desperate and delusional—all became an exercise in how quickly a patient could be treated and released. Readers meet an endless procession of these broken souls, some more sympathetic than others, and get a sense of the difficulty of the author’s job. Holland describes how the staff competed to identify which patients were feigning symptoms to score a warm bed and hot meal, until the author, shaken after a scary incident, realized that “even the lying patients are still coming to the hospital because they are in need. Don’t send them away empty-handed.” Unfortunately, few of the patients’ stories are particularly memorable, and Holland misses countless opportunities to make them so. Because she is so focused on her journey from tough girl to “working mother of two with a heart of mush,” the take-home message from each of these vignettes, when there is one, almost always relates only to the narrator—who, despite this, does not come across as a particularly self-aware storyteller. There are some moving moments of genuine insight, but they are dulled by so much extraneous detail that everything starts to feel arbitrary. A more focused narrative, with half as many patients whose stories carried twice as much weight, would have made for a much stronger book.
Despite a promising premise and a few fascinating stories, the book is ill-focused and overlong.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80766-0
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
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