Iowa essayist Dominick’s powerful first book is a harrowingly detailed, compulsively readable memoir of her life as a diabetic. Dominick learned that she had diabetes at the age of nine. She was already familiar with the disease, having observed her college-age sister, Denise, go through her daily regimen of insulin injections and blood-sugar testing. As a child, Dominick would fish Denise’s used needles out of the trash and use then to inject her stuffed animals. She and her brother would use them for water fights and often took syringes to school to show off for the other kids. Once she’s afflicted, though, she has to learn to cope with her schoolmates— teasing and the embarrassment of the occasional insulin reaction or sugar shock. Dominick spares the reader no gritty detail: she graphically describes everything from urine tests to her daily injection in a “painless” area of her arm. Eschewing the doctor’s “rotation” method, she finds the triceps on her left arm hardening until it “looks like an overdeveloped muscle.” She recounts how Denise, as a teenager, would inject peroxide into her pimples. Always her “hero,” Denise died at the age of 33 from diabetic complications and heavy cocaine use. During her own teen years, Dominick would “diet” by not taking her insulin shots, becoming near-comatose from the resulting high sugar levels. Pregnant at 17, she underwent an extremely dangerous abortion. Though she did her best not to allow diabetes to rule her life or dictate her behavior, in her mid-20s Dominick underwent a series of eye operations for diabetic retinopathy, leaving her with “the vision of the old.” After her marriage, she insisted on a tubal ligation because of the dangers of pregnancy and her refusal to pass the disease on to any offspring. The general grimness is relieved by Dominick’s acid wit. Decidedly not for the squeamish.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84232-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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