A mixed bag but of interest to health policy wonks and activists.
A scion of an American dynasty recounts years of addiction, mental illness, and family dysfunction—matters that, as the title suggests, are altogether too ordinary.
Kennedy, son of Ted, is probably best known today for crashing his car into a barricade in front of his workplace under the influence of medication. This memoir opens with that event, promising, “I’m never going to remember what actually happened that night in early May of 2006 when I slammed my green Mustang into the police barrier in front of the US Capitol.” The sentence is diagnostic, both mechanically and materially, of the narrative that follows: awkward, sometimes evasive, with good thoughts clunkily expressed. Why a green Mustang? That detail is less important than the multihued pills that punctuate the narrative. We sympathize with Kennedy when we learn that illnesses such as bipolar disorder fall into a category of things that members of the clan are supposed to face stoically, without making a fuss: “I grew up,” he writes, “among people who were geniuses at not talking about things.” Effectively shut out by his father as an embarrassing reminder of weakness, Kennedy squeaked by with a narrow electoral victory to become a U.S. representative, continuing a legacy of public service—and, sad to say, a history of drug and alcohol abuse. A quarter of Americans have a similar story, by Kennedy’s account. While’s there’s some special pleading involved—“My father would have been President of the United States if there had been progressive mental health treatment for him,” he insists—much of the narrative is given over to plainspoken advocacy for mental health initiatives, some enacted into law thanks to his persistent efforts. That account goes on too long, but it makes for a useful look at the politics underlying public health; to trust Kennedy’s anecdotes, it’s amazing that anything under that rubric gets done at all.
A mixed bag but of interest to health policy wonks and activists.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17332-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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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