A harrowing though not uncommon story.
Huber (Creative Writing/Ashland Univ. and Georgia Southern Univ., Opa Nobody, 2008) chronicles her torturous efforts to navigate the health-care system.
Growing up in the 1970s in a middle-class family, the author experienced a fairly uneventful childhood and adolescence—during which she was “laser focused” on academic success—marred only by occasional severe headaches. However, by her sophomore year in college, she began suffering from severe panic attacks and blackouts. Initially she rejected the medical recommendation that she take “a little blue pill” and turned instead to alternative medicine. Not only did she entrust her health to a “patchwork safety net of community health practitioners,” but after graduation she took paid work as a lobbyist for universal health care. Ironically the job did not come with health benefits, and she began a 13-year slide into poverty. With 11 gaps in health-insurance coverage, her health worsened, even though, when money permitted, she took antidepressants. During that time, she worked at a succession of jobs, including community organizer, reporter at a local newspaper, adjunct college lecturer and a freelance writer, earning two MFA degrees along the way. The author describes her life during those years as a “torrid and twisted love affair with health insurance.” By the time she was 33, she was married, although soon to be divorced, and the mother of a young child. The good news was that she had learned to game the public-health system and deal with insurance companies by using “a bit of logic and a bit of force.” In 2006, she accepted a full-time teaching job at Georgia Southern, a position that came with major health-insurance benefits. After a thorough medical examination, she learned that many of her health problems were caused by a malformed jaw and were treatable.
A harrowing though not uncommon story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2623-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
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