A grim reproof to all who want to deny that AIDS has arrived in America's heartland. For five years in the late 1980s, Verghese was an infectious- diseases specialist in Johnson City, a town in northeastern Tennessee; in that time he saw his AIDS patient load soar from 1 to more than 80. AIDS was brought to Johnson City by way of New York, San Francisco, Miami, and elsewhere by prodigal gay sons who, after a few years of freedom, returned home to die. It was brought by way of a truck stop on the interstate where gay locals congregated for anonymous sex. It was brought by way of transfusions of tainted blood. With the observant—but never dispassionate—eye of the clinician, Verghese notes everything about the remarkable, varied patients who seek his help, including: Will Johnson, a Bible Belt entrepreneur who believes AIDS comes from Satan; Luther Hines, whose bitter rage keeps him alive while his body is consumed by tuberculosis, candidiasis, and other infections; Vickie McCray, who faithfully cares for the unfaithful husband who infected her as he sinks into AIDS dementia. Verghese leaves nothing to the imagination as he describes the gruesome effects of the opportunistic infections that attack those with AIDS. He surprises us with unpredictable instances of compassion (friends changing diapers on a man with uncontrollable diarrhea) and cruelty (from members of the medical profession). But this is also Verghese's personal story, which dovetails with that of his patients. As a foreign-born doctor of Indian descent tending outcast patients, he too was a bit of an outsider in rural Tennessee. He is touchingly honest about his own flaws and about the strain his all-consuming medical practice placed on his marriage. Verghese, who has written for the New Yorker and other publications, offers a powerful testimony to the courage of those who live and die with AIDS and of those who care for them. (Book- of-the-Month Club alternate selection; Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78514-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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