Some readers may find hope from Roppé’s successful battle with cancer, but her self-indulgent tone may leave others...
A cancer diagnosis almost derails a woman’s journey to rock stardom.
After more than 10 years as a corporate lawyer, Roppé finally listened to her heart, quit her job and began making music in earnest. Her dreams were put on hold, however, when her doctor gave her a devastating diagnosis of breast cancer. With the support of her steadfast husband and two young daughters, Roppé resolved to do whatever it took to beat the cancer and take the stage once more. The author provides several interesting stories, including a particularly detailed account of her work as an extra on Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), but many of her early anecdotes have little to do with either her burgeoning new career as a rock singer or her struggle as a cancer patient. For example, readers unclear on how to pronounce her last name will find several paragraphs discussing it. Even when directly discussing her cancer diagnosis, Roppé fails to adequately address how it temporarily derailed her musical aspirations. She is also quick to point out the positives in her situation, which can be inspiring, but she never explores the darker aspects of her battle. The later chapters begin with e-mails from her online buddy Jane, a fellow breast-cancer victim. Unfortunately for the author, Jane’s e-mails about her life are more open and engaging than the majority of the author’s narrative.
Some readers may find hope from Roppé’s successful battle with cancer, but her self-indulgent tone may leave others unsatisfied.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58005-417-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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