Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.
Black (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, 2011) details how she coped with the death of her father, then with a series of illnesses and other devastating personal losses.
The author’s father, a professor of math at MIT, was her best friend, especially during her teenage years. When she became “suspicious about the nature of existence,” he was always there to counter her fears with his no-nonsense “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” view of life. His decline and death not long after she graduated from Harvard upended her world. Already unsure what she would do with her life, Black “stopped paying [her] bills and doing laundry” as she battled an eating disorder. She sought work halfheartedly, first as a movie theater usher and then an ice cream server. Just as she began making peace with her father’s death, the author finally stumbled into a job as a proofreader. She bought a house in the country, found Jesus, and met the writer-boyfriend she christened “the Last of the Last Great Men.” Her happily settled life took an unexpected turn for the worse when she suddenly began to experience disturbing physical symptoms that no doctor or health test could explain. She then embarked on a medical odyssey that seemed to end with a diagnosis of mold illness. Even after she began treatment and got rid of her home and all her infected possessions, she continued to have symptoms that defied medical logic. Hysterical, Black took out her frustrations on her long-suffering boyfriend, who eventually left. Visits to the many subsequent specialists she saw in her quest for answers showed that her gut was not only a “Disneyland for pathogens,” but that she was suffering from iron overload. Though at times overly disjointed, the book still succeeds in offering a candid depiction of a woman’s struggle with her own vulnerabilities as she seeks to understand the “pile of terrifyingly beautiful rubble” left in the wake of all her struggles.
Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0059-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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