Though Jessop’s circumstances were unusual—and particularly harrowing—her memoir will appeal to many women who have left...
Born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the author describes her life before, during and after her marriage at 18 to a 50-year-old man with three other wives.
This painful memoir certainly doesn’t bear much resemblance to the polygamous fantasies of the HBO series Big Love. The author’s large family lived in grinding poverty, and Jessop was constantly subjected to humiliations at the hands of her husband, Merril. But she had inner resources. In a decidedly patriarchal culture, she often spoke her mind, and she talked Merril into letting her go to college. Her occasional questioning of his views, however, earned his suspicion and the condescension and mistrust of her fellow wives. So what kept Jessop in the community? Fear. From her earliest childhood, when she played a game called “apocalypse,” she had been taught that God punished those who disobeyed his rules. Furthermore, she knew that no woman had ever managed to get herself and her children safely away from the community. Still, one night in 2003, Jessop snuck her eight children out of the house and fled to Salt Lake City. There, she found little in the way of support networks for women escaping polygamy. She was told that “there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country.” The chapters about her struggles to adjust to this new life are more riveting than the occasionally tedious descriptions of her earlier hardships. Especially wrenching are scenes featuring the two of Jessop’s children who felt torn between their parents and resented their mother for taking them away from the FLDS church. The book’s final pages recount triumphs large and small, from getting her first stylish haircut to standing up to her husband in court.
Though Jessop’s circumstances were unusual—and particularly harrowing—her memoir will appeal to many women who have left abusive relationships.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2756-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
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