Empathetic, vividly rendered and impossible to put down.
An American poet recalls the medical maladies that befell him in college and beyond.
While a freshman at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., in the late 1990s, Lemon (Hallelujah Blackout, 2008, etc.) began experiencing episodes of blurry vision, mouth bleeds, dizziness, fainting spells and memory loss. He was slated to be the catcher on Macalester’s baseball team, but his symptoms combined to transform him into a tortured zombie. Nicknamed “Happy” by his college buddies, the author became anything but. An MRI test showed that he had suffered a brain aneurysm from a lesion precariously situated on his brain stem. Though doctors insisted he would eventually recover from the stroke, he continued to experience unexplained anger and embarrassing erectile dysfunction, and he eventually attempted suicide. Recalling his childhood sexual abuse exacerbated matters. Another hemorrhage forced Lemon to endure a risky brain operation to excise the lesion. The pain, confusion, panic and frustration of living a young life saddled with a possibly lethal medical crisis thrusted him into a depressive state pacified only with copious amounts of alcohol, drugs and denial. It was a long road back to some semblance of normalcy, but the author finally emerged healthier and relatively happy—thanks, in part, to his valiant single mother (“Ma”), a hilariously memorable artist who helped rehabilitate her son with unflagging love and much-needed stability. Lemon’s writing is saturated with beautifully descriptive passages, and the narrative flows with an unrushed, conversational cadence. His prose shimmers in places readers will least expect: the running track at the break of dawn, the view from the floor of his dorm room after he collapses (“The world whirls when I crack open. Bookshelf, poster board, the windows wink their eyes…Every light pulses yelloworange and brilliant, and the TV is a blue splash”), a doctor’s clinical, measured movements, and breathlessly divulging the crushing diagnosis to his family (“the truth drops through me like a rain of nails”).
Empathetic, vividly rendered and impossible to put down.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5023-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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