A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.
Surviving and thriving as a family with autistic twins.
Ana and Curt Warner take turns narrating this powerful tale of life with twin boys with autism. The couple met while Curt was a successful member of the Seattle Seahawks, but this isn’t a sports story. An early priority for the Warners was to build a family, but they first suffered from a tragic stillbirth and miscarriages. Finally, a healthy son, Jonathan, was born, soon followed by twin boys, Austin and Christian. It was soon clear that the twins were not developing normally, but despite a series of physician visits, no answers could be found. At last, they found a doctor who realized right away that the twins had autism, which was, at the time, a little-understood disorder. The Warners’ story is both heart-wrenching and also uplifting, as they chronicle how they learned to handle two children who kicked holes in walls, ate tongue depressors in the doctor’s office, discovered new ways to escape the house, and watched Disney films with absolute obsession. The family struggled through isolation, misplaced guilt, anger, and radical changes in lifestyle, ranging from diet to constant home repair. Two low points drive home the difficulties the couple faced. First, there were Ana’s thoughts of suicide, in which she imagined freeing her husband and older son by driving herself and the twins off a cliff. Second, while playing out a scene from a Disney film, Austin set the family’s house on fire, destroying it and nearly taking his mother’s life. Despite unimaginable struggles, the family survived and even adopted a baby girl. The twins, meanwhile, moved into early adulthood with part-time jobs. Rather than delve into arguments over the causes of autism, the authors focus on awareness and the need for support.
A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0056-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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