Deserves a wide audience.
Skloot sketches the similarities between his own mental deterioration due to a brain-ravaging virus and his nonagenarian mother’s dementia.
This sequel to In the Shadow of Memory (2003) opens shortly after Skloot moves his mother from her home in New York to a long-term care facility near his Oregon residence. For most of her life, Lillian Skloot was a bitter, harsh woman; her son now finds himself navigating an emotionally charged role reversal as he tries to accept the sweet, childlike dependent that she has become. Perhaps the most distinguished aspect of this book, sections of which were previously published in The Best American Science Writing 2003, The Best American Essays 2004 and The Antioch Review, is Skloot’s economy in rendering his miserable childhood. Instead of lengthy, purple litanies of youthful horrors, he offers spare sentences that evoke a world. “For years I thought mothers normally bit deep gouges into their own wrists when children spilled a glass of milk,” he writes. “I imagined all boys and girls listened while their mothers dialed the phone, asked to talk to the director of the county hospital’s ‘insane unit,’ and asked if there was a room available for a little boy who had disobeyed his mother.” The book does, at times, feel disjointed. (At one point, for example, Skloot interrupts an eloquent description of his mother for a seemingly irrelevant recollection of an adolescent romance. Perhaps this disjointedness pushes the reader even further into the author’s territory, a place where our minds are not reliable, where we feel dislocated, where we have to come to terms with our own frailty and the frailty of those we love.
Deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-4318-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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