Down for the count in his prime, now back on tour minus most of his small intestine and much of his body weight, a remarkably centered rock singer/songwriter chronicles his affliction with restraint and wry pluck in unbuttoned, conversational British. After months in the hospital, the ultimate diagnosis—of an extremely rare autoimmune syndrome that ravages blood vessels and leads to critical organ damage—matters less than Watt's experience of the ordeal and its strength-conferring lesson: ``I felt I had the scoop on life and death and everyone else was still running around after it.'' Pain was unremitting—from the disease, the tests, the surgeries, the treatments and inevitable side effects, the lines and the tubes and the needles that antagonized his sluggish veins. Pleasure was the luxury of a piss without the catheter, the tremendous contentment of a shower. Watt observed his acculturation to hospitalism: One day while vomiting radioactive orange juice after a scan, ``the invisible thread that had been tying me to home . . . had slackened. I became interested only in making things bearable for the next twenty minutes''; and elsewhere, with typical compression, ``weather is for other people.'' When there was room in the isolation of Watt's crucible, Tracey—the female half of his band and his household—faithfully anchored him. Watt emerged from the worst of his affliction with a more resonant singing voice, a new face in the mirror (which he regarded respectfully, ``impressed by the patience I saw there''), and a drastically foreshortened gut still prone to ``lock up'' every few weeks despite his adherence to a bizarre diet enhanced by steroids and immunosuppressants. In conclusion, ``It doesn't do to dwell on my bad luck . . . but it takes time to round it into the good times.'' Time plus the wisdom acquired in extremis and leavened by native aplomb. In both its graphic and reflective modes, this is resilient, just-so reporting. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1612-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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