by Buzz Bissinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2012
An intriguing memoir that suffers from confusing narrative lapses, such as contradictory accounts of Zach's work history.
The author of Friday Night Lights (1990) chronicles a cross-country road trip he shared with his 24-year-old brain-damaged son Zach.
In addition to probing his son's inner life, Vanity Fair and Daily Beast contributor Bissinger (Three Nights in August, 2005, etc.) attempts to re-create the pleasure he took in being on the road with his own father. The author explains that Zach has the comprehension skills of a 9-year-old because of brain damage suffered at the time of his premature birth, three minutes later than his twin brother Gerry. Yet while Zach's mental processes are slow, he has a phenomenal memory, complete recall of past events, friends with whom he corresponds by e-mail and a close relationship with Gerry. Because of his limited mental capacities, Zach works as a supermarket bagger: “He has been doing the same job for five years, and he will do the same job for the rest of his life,” writes the author. “My son's professional destiny is paper or plastic.” Bissinger laments what he believes to be his son’s impoverished mental life in ways that sometimes seem unduly condescending—e.g., expressing disappointment that he prefers swimming or sitting by the hotel pool to gambling at the tables in Las Vegas, one of the stops on their trip. The author describes an exciting bungee jump that he shared with his son, and meetings with friends and relatives they visit on the way to Los Angeles, but much of the book is devoted to flashbacks about incidents in his own life, his failures and disappointments as well as the pains and pleasures of fatherhood. Surprisingly, while he had hoped to help his son expand his mental horizons, the author was the one who gained valuable insights, one of which was the realization that his son does indeed have a rich inner life.
An intriguing memoir that suffers from confusing narrative lapses, such as contradictory accounts of Zach's work history.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-81656-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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