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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE

Name: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE
Author: Lucy Grealy
ISBN: 0-395-65780-6

by Lucy Grealy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 1994

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A gracefully written account of one woman's physical and spiritual struggle to surmount childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and, ultimately, ``the deep bottomless grief...called ugliness.'' After surviving relentless medical horrors—the removal at age nine of half her jaw due to Ewing Sarcoma, two and a half years of chemotherapy, and two years of reconstructive surgery—Grealy's true battle begins when she looks in the mirror and finds herself trapped behind a face, in a ``self'' that she hates, and for which her peers cruelly punish her. Once a buoyant, sociable tomboy, Grealy, through her suffering, becomes isolated—finding human comfort mainly among the patients she meets in her numerous hospital stays. She writes, ``I felt as if my illness were a blanket the world had thrown over me.... And somehow I transformed that blanket into a tent, beneath which I almost happily set up camp.'' Still a young girl, she must cope not only with her own fear but with the awkwardly expressed fears of her parents as well. Eventually, as she grows up, she finds solace and inspiration in the company of horses and other animals, and as a young adult, she cultivates an enriching inner life through reading, and later writing. Now an award-winning poet and essayist (a short version of her tale originally appeared in Harper's and received a National Magazine Award), Grealy's tale ends not with magical deliverance, but with hard-won self-acceptance. Nearly two decades and 30 surgical procedures later, Grealy finally stops waiting for her life to begin and comes to terms with her face—her ``self.'' An unsentimental, honest, unflinching look at a single visage reflected (or distorted) in an unforgiving cultural mirror. A strong debut.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1994

ISBN: 0-395-65780-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)