Sensitive without being overly sentimental.
The heartwarming story of a working-class single mother, her autistic son and the stray cat who brought them together as a family.
Pet rescuer Romp was 22 and unmarried when she gave birth to her son, George. She knew he was different from the outset—restless and always screaming, he “seemed almost tormented by life.” Feeling bewildered by her son's bizarre anti-social behaviors and guilty that she couldn't give him a two-parent home, Romp became even more exasperated by the assurances others gave her that George would eventually adjust. It wasn't until her son was 10, however, that the school psychologists confirmed that George was not only autistic, but also had “ADHD and paranoid tendencies.” The diagnosis allowed him to get the help he needed, but doctors warned Romp that George would never be a “cuddly boy.” Salvation for both mother and son came shortly thereafter in the form of a “thin and sickly” stray cat named Ben. Although George had never been able to bond with other animals, he formed an intense relationship with Ben. Almost immediately, George began speaking to it in a gentle voice, which gave Romp a glimpse of her son’s unseen emotional depths. The cat became Romp's key to accessing the closeness she desired with her son, which she achieved by joining him in the narrative world he built around Ben. But when their beloved pet suddenly went missing, her relationship with George was tested. Fortunately, she found the cat a few days before Christmas. More importantly, though, she discovered that while her family of three wasn't the most conventional, it “didn't make it any less of one.”
Sensitive without being overly sentimental.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-452-29878-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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