Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.
First-book author Barber recalls the suicide of one boyhood friend, the disintegration of another, his own experiences working with the homeless, mentally handicapped and mentally ill—and wonders why he’s been able to emerge from the tangled wood and others have not.
Barber (Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health/Yale Univ. School of Medicine) mixes affecting autobiographical anecdotes, self-deprecating humor, summaries of psychiatric cases and speculations about the meaning of life. He begins with his most powerful segment, the 1983 suicide of his close friend Henry, an act no one witnessed but that Barber imagines with great poignancy. (Later, he employs, to diminishing effect, the same technique in imagining the suicide of that same friend’s mother, who years later killed herself in the same remote location and fashion as her son.) Barber relates many stories about his school and collegiate days (he dropped out of Harvard, then returned and graduated), including some harrowing times when he watched Henry systematically destroy every object in his room. He also tells about his long struggles with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and his initially liberating experiences with Prozac, along the way offering some details about his parents and about his courtship and marriage. He sort of backed into the mental health profession by taking a job in a home for the mentally retarded, which led to his eventually working long hours at Bellevue and helping at homeless shelters. His wife’s pregnancy, he says, transported him from the shelters to the Ivy League. In closing, Barber observes that he and his close friends—all bright, all successful in school—might have struggled because they’d had to create their own war to fight, unlike the WWII and Vietnam generations, who were challenged by history more directly and profoundly. Some of the segments—especially the long case narratives—seem more tangential than essential.
Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.Pub Date: March 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-1298-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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