While the fanciful imagery employed by Oxnam may give his story greater impact, it will not authenticate it for skeptics who...
Memoir may not quite be the word to describe this account, which is presented as the work of several personalities, each speaking for him or herself.
The principal narrator, Robert, is the dominant personality, but this was not always so, according to Oxnam, an Asia specialist and business consultant who asserts that for some 30 years, another personality, Bob, was dominant. Memory blackouts, bizarre behaviors and alcoholism led him in 1989 to Dr. Jeffrey Smith, a psychiatrist with some experience with multiple personalities. Oxnam began twice-a-week sessions with the psychiatrist, who in mid-1990 told him that he had multiple personality disorder (MPD, now renamed dissociative identity disorder, or DID) after a session in which an alternate personality, Tommy, an angry adolescent boy, emerged. As their sessions continued, other so-called alters—Young Bob, Robbey, Robert, Witch, Eyes, Lawrence, the Librarian, Baby and Wanda—all trapped inside separate parts of a dark castle, appeared. Labels identify which section of the narrative comes from which voice. Although Oxnam’s childhood memories were initially vague, under therapy he recovered memories of early, ugly abuse. In MPD theory, dissociation is a method of coping with the trauma of such abuse. Through long therapy, Oxnam gradually freed the alters from the castle and achieved partial integration of the personalities. By the end, three of the alters—Bobby, Wanda and Robert—remain separate, but have worked out a “collaborative multiplicity,” with Bobby providing his youthful energy, Wanda her internal incisiveness and outer perceptiveness and Robert his drive. Oxnam weaves into this psychological narrative stories of trials and triumphs from his professional life, which include dealings with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the first President Bush, and scenes from his marriage to a remarkably understanding woman.
While the fanciful imagery employed by Oxnam may give his story greater impact, it will not authenticate it for skeptics who question either the existence of MPD as a genuine mental disorder or the legitimacy of recovered memories.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0227-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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