A candid memoir about the toll depression can take on body, mind and spirit, offering hope for sufferers and their loved...
This memoir chronicles the story of one woman’s courageous battle with depression and how, rather than destroying her life, the crippling disease ended up improving it.
Keiffer (Word-Temple Person, 2007, etc.) seemed to have it all. She held an enviable position at a prestigious advertising agency; she had a husband who loved her; and she had a well-behaved, lovable teenage son and a slew of loyal friends. It was hard to fathom, then, why she began slipping into a deep depression, which left her feeling not only incapacitated and weak, but also suicidal. Keiffer’s battle with depression began when she started feeling extreme pressure to succeed at a fast-paced ad agency in San Francisco. As her main priority shifted to doing better and better at work, she began to notice that she felt odd, “like a visitor from another planet”—lethargic, disinterested in food and no longer able to find enjoyment. She also had an inexplicable rash on her body. Eventually, Keiffer realized she had reached a place where she was no longer able to function, and she took leave from her job, going from her own bedroom to a hospital to a supportive friend’s home to try to recuperate. Keiffer’s book chronicles her excruciating journey, from the fall into depression through the climb out of it. As she explains in her introduction, “I will take you down into the abyss of my depression with the truest words I can find. And I will leave nothing out—not the chaos of the fall, the deadening despair, nor the love that was a candle in my darkness.” Keiffer focuses much of her story on the pulls of feminine and masculine instincts inside of her (labeling these instincts “Valentine” and “Duke,” respectively), and she explains how this conflict exacerbated her depression. Her book offers not only a brutally honest account of what it feels like to deal with depression, but also the hopeful and optimistic story of overcoming it.
A candid memoir about the toll depression can take on body, mind and spirit, offering hope for sufferers and their loved ones.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989380102
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Shadow Dance Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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