The dramatic, sad story of a young woman's prolonged death from cancer, as told by her devastated father. Novelist Hobbie's (The Day, 1993, etc.) history takes a novel's form, told in the third person from the point of view of the writer/father. Brett was the oldest of his three children, red-haired like him, ``a dazzling young woman . . . hastening to a world of possibilities'' when she moved from the East Coast to San Francisco at age 23 to begin life on her own. Shortly after she began her first job as a writer, a small lump appeared above Brett's collarbone. The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma. Medical experts squabbled over the prospects of a cure as Brett began four years of debilitating tests and therapy, in and out of hospitals, in and out of emergency rooms. Sieges of fever, coughing, and often agonizing pain were interspersed with long, hopeful periods of remission. During one of those periods, she acquired a lover, Beth. Within a month, symptoms returned. Brett kept a journal and wrote letters; when words could no longer serve her, she began to paint, trying to express both the intensity of her suffering and her persistent claim to a life outside her disease. For the last summer of her life, she and Beth returned to live near her family in Massachusetts, where Brett and those she loved tried to reconcile themselves to her death. This is always her father's story, reconstructed from the journal he kept through those long years. As eloquently and honestly as it is recounted, Brett's tragedy is filtered through his sometimes self-conscious sorrow. Too painful to be a comfort to other parents and lovers, this is—as it seems meant to be—a tribute to the richness and vitality of a young woman who fought to make every dying day count for life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-2520-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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