A brave, candid memoir that earnestly seeks to help readers who have also suffered loss.
Part memoir, part self-help treatise, Hopkinson’s debut book chronicles her son’s death and the grief that nearly destroyed her own life.
Hopkinson’s memoir begins when her 21-year-old son, Brent, was killed in a motorcycle accident on the campus of his Arizona university. He had borrowed a friend’s bike, although he wasn’t trained to ride it. At a stop sign, the bike stalled and Brent accelerated to keep it in gear, unintentionally catapulting himself forward and hitting a wall behind the school’s library. Hopkinson tells the story in vivid, excruciating detail, revisiting her son’s death and the stages of mourning that gripped her in its aftermath. She opens a window into her emotional life, from the phone call in which she learns of the accident to her trip to Arizona, the decision to take him off life support, and then then the return trip to her Massachusetts home to plan his funeral. After the initial shock of Brent’s death, Hopkinson’s depression deepened. Her marriage of 30 years dissolved; she contemplated suicide. She finally found solace in what she calls spirituality, which for her involves meditating daily and seeking mediums to communicate with Brent and assure her that his spirit is still with her. The story is heartfelt and deeply touching, but it is awkwardly paired with a self-help component that makes the narrator’s voice vacillate between memoirist and educator. In her introduction, Hopkinson details Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At the end of each chapter, she includes a “reflection” that explains the stages she went through and reads like a workbook in managing grief. Within the chapters, the narrative occasionally veers into the role of instructor, sometimes directly addressing the reader and offering advice. Sometimes, the narrative devolves into homily and explicit lessons, saying, for example, that everyone processes grief differently, a point repeated throughout the book. In mining her own suffering, though, she provides hope for other grieving parents.
A brave, candid memoir that earnestly seeks to help readers who have also suffered loss.Pub Date: April 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479795277
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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