A fractured, unpolished but chilling record of dark institutional misdeeds.
After being hospitalized as a girl in 1950s Montreal, memoirist Rossi recalls her years spent as an unwilling medical test subject, most likely under a project funded by the CIA.
Too much of Rossi’s life took place in institutions, beginning at age 6 when her mother abandons her at an orphanage without informing the rest of the family. Rossi eventually returns home, only for her father to die, which results in another 4-year-long orphanage stint. After getting out, Rossi contracts hepatitis; at age 16 she’s checked into Royal Victoria Hospital, a teaching hospital. There, her prescribed drugs include a tranquilizer known to aggravate hepatitis—unsurprisingly, she doesn’t recover. Worse, she grows depressed, which leads to a transfer to the hospital’s psychiatric arm—the Allan Memorial Institute, with clandestine funding from the CIA—and back again, several times over the next three-and-a-half years. That’s where her initial indignities—painful needles, pills swallowed without water, manhandling by interns—transform into abject mistreatment: she’s injected with mysterious, deleterious drugs and deprived their antidotes; doctors wheel her into the operating theatre for unauthorized surgeries; and cruel sleep therapy keeps her mostly asleep for a month. Most of the startling though stiff and disjointed narrative is pure description, with little dialogue or emphasis on scene-setting and plot trajectory. Misplaced excerpts abruptly interrupt the narrative without explanation, while numerous spelling and grammatical errors distract from the agony as well. Fortunately, Rossi survived to lead a happy adult life—this book serves as a testament to her unbreakable will. But a cleaner presentation and sharper perspective are needed to carry this litany of injustices beyond sympathy into whole-hearted outrage.
A fractured, unpolished but chilling record of dark institutional misdeeds.Pub Date: July 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1426970368
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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