A powerful portrait of a man who, despite all odds, managed to live a normal life.
A father’s suicide sets the stage for this wrenching account of a man's lifelong battle with mental illness, creatively written in his voice, as imagined by his daughter.
At the age of 17, Mel Toews was diagnosed as suffering from manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder. Psychiatrists warned him he would not be able to live a normal life, yet despite these warnings, he fell in love, got married, reared two daughters, and taught elementary school for more than 40 years in the small town of Steinbach, Manitoba. Mel's ordered life seemed to be a triumph of spirit and self-discipline, yet he often was unable to function, particularly at home (he didn't utter one sound for an entire year). Finally, after a lifetime of struggle, Mel succumbed to the disease and took his own life. During his last days in the hospital, he asked his daughter Miriam to write down words or sentences he hoped would lead him out of his confusion. It was this glimpse into her father’s troubled mind that led her to write a longer account from his point of view. She shows the progression of Mel's deterioration, skillfully entwining in his words the effect of the illness not only on the individual, but also on his family. In expressive, often unrelentingly painful prose, the narration ranges from choppy thoughts to moving passages: “I was caught in a no man's land, paralyzed in a place that lay somewhere in between my past and my future, unable to move or dream or call out for help, or even die.” Mel’s last words to his daughter: “Nothing accomplished.”
A powerful portrait of a man who, despite all odds, managed to live a normal life.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-587-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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