In sometimes moving prose, Shawn reveals the psychological damage of having and losing a twin.
Deeply personal memoir that also examines the mystery of autism.
Composer and pianist Shawn (Music/Bennington Coll.; Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life, 2007, etc.) explores the impact on his life of having a twin sister, Mary, who was sent away the summer they turned nine and who has been institutionalized ever since. While his previous memoir focused on his phobias, this one reexamines his agoraphobia, speculates on his own autistic proclivities and lays bare family secrets. (The author’s father was the famously phobic editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, and his brother is the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn.) As Shawn examines the literature on autism and reports on his findings, the narrative also serves as a capsule history of the scientific understanding of autism. When Mary was a child, Bruno Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” theory of autism was still respected; today, scientists recognize the complexity and range of the autistic spectrum. The most fascinating sections of the book, however, are the personal passages about Shawn’s parents’ lives, his teen years and his discovery of music. “Mary’s absence had been left largely undiscussed and papered over in our family life,” he writes. “Something essential in me had been papered over too, and music was my one means of access to it” In a striking image, the author compares himself and Mary to binary stars, “orbiting individually but subject to each other’s gravitational pull.” Although he frequently describes Mary’s appearance, actions and speech, it is not until the penultimate chapter—in which he details a day-long visit with her at the institution in Delaware where she has spent her adult years—that Mary comes to life for the reader. However, understanding how her mind works, what she perceives about her world and what she is feeling are tasks that even her twin brother cannot accomplish.
In sometimes moving prose, Shawn reveals the psychological damage of having and losing a twin.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02237-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
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