An affectingly honest account of what it means to watch helplessly as a loved one suffers: a timely addition to the...
A husband’s frank, conflicted recollections of coping with his young wife’s stage-four breast cancer.
Brendan, a Boston high-school English teacher, and wife Kirsten are both 32 when she is diagnosed in September 2000. They have a three-year-old daughter, Rowen, they’ve just moved into a new house, and life so far has been pretty good. But the cancer has spread to Kirsten’s spine, so before they perform a mastectomy her doctors advise chemotherapy. Brendan describes Kirsten’s rounds of treatments (he shaves off his hair when she loses hers), his efforts at parenting, and his occasionally difficult relations with his mother and his in-laws, who are trying to help but have needs of their own. His story alternates heartbreaking moments of despair (a round of chemotherapy that doesn’t work) with inspiring affirmations of love and life (a birthday party that fills their small house with supportive friends). Brendan is beguilingly frank about his fears and failings: his father died suddenly when he was nine, which has made him a hypochondriac fearful of death; he admits that he finds it easier to work than to stay home with his convalescing wife; and he does notice pretty women, though he is resolutely and lovingly faithful. At his Unitarian church, he wrestles with questions of faith, of good and evil; not always certain about God, he is deeply appreciative of fellow churchgoers who clean and pitch in when he needs them. Video games, music, and movies also help a little. Brendan admits that, although Kirsten has survived chemo, he is writing a story with a choice of possible endings, most unhappy. His prose is breezy, his attitudes hip, but he vividly describes real anguish and fears.
An affectingly honest account of what it means to watch helplessly as a loved one suffers: a timely addition to the literature of disease.Pub Date: March 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50716-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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