A moving, beautifully written chronicle of true love and a clarion call for health-care reform.
The hot-button issue of unregulated health-care costs underscores this engaging memoir of marriage and terminal illness.
Bennett (In Memoriam, 1997, etc.), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and executive editor at Bloomberg News, met Terence Foley at a party while on assignment in China in 1983. Lounging on a sofa in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, he plied the lonesome, deadline-driven reporter with tall tales of being a Fulbright Scholar—in reality, however, he was the wacky director of the American Soybean Association. Nevertheless, this became their “signature story,” and a lifetime love was born for Bennett and her visceral, fastidiously dressed beau, 12 years her senior. Their eccentric, restless 20-year marriage produced two children (one biological, one adopted) and plenty of highs and lows, all recounted through the author’s droll, conversational anecdotes. Foley’s colon cancer was diagnosed in late 2000, followed by the discovery of a rare, aggressive kidney carcinoma, which may (or may not have) contributed to his death. Bennett discovered the ambiguity of his diagnosis while poring over her husband’s medical records. While retracing the path of his terminal prognosis, she uncovered a flawed system of mismanaged lab information, astronomical insurance charges and conditional physician reimbursements. The author leaves readers with more questions than answers after dealing with an industry that sets prices “like a giant Chinese bazaar” yet facilitated her husband’s participation in experimental clinical trials.
A moving, beautifully written chronicle of true love and a clarion call for health-care reform.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6984-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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