Maxwell (Eighteen Roses Red, 2006, etc.) revisits her son’s suicide and her subsequent grieving process.
When her 35-year-old son, Bill, committed suicide in 1989, Maxwell was shocked. Bill was seemingly happy and healthy. Married to a woman he loved, the father of two small children and engaged in a promising career, he was someone whom Maxwell felt had “found his place in life.” Maxwell recalls the days and weeks after Bill’s death with a mixture of palpable grief, journalistic detail and wisdom gained from the passage of time. As she carries on in the face of this almost unbearable loss, and as her family participates in the rituals associated with saying goodbye, Maxwell scours Bill’s life for signs of suffering that the family may have overlooked. She catches glimpses of Bill’s distress, including the haunting detail that an 8-year-old Bill told his younger brother he wanted to kill himself. One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is in how Bill’s wife, Laura, his children and his siblings navigate how to preserve and honor his memory. In the final chapters, Maxwell explores depression and suicide directly, drawing from extensive readings and her family’s experience. She concludes that societal attitudes toward suicide—described as “moralistic” and “superstitious”—are not only wrong but damaging. Her final advice to grieving readers: “Be willing to live with the unanswered questions and with your grief.” Time has provided Maxwell with the clarity to assess her grieving, but this memoir will be most comforting to those recently unmoored by a loss. This unusually thoughtful, considered memoir will be valuable and inspirational to readers who have lost a loved one to suicide.
Pub Date: March 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468555929
Page Count: 124
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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