A fascinating exploration of personal identity from a writer whose body is, thankfully, “no longer at war.”
The stroke that hit Lee at age 33 left no visible signs of trauma, but it still changed her life forever.
A decade ago, the stealthy heart condition secretly lurking deep within the author since birth created a blood clot that shot through her body and lodged itself in her head, where “it killed a part of my brain.” Lee was standing in a hardware store parking lot at the time, thinking how odd it was that the shiny red snowblowers on display were suddenly and inexplicably “rotated ninety degrees.” What follows is the author’s emotionally explicit and intensely circumspect chronicle of how she dealt with what doctors later determined to be a thalamic stroke. “In those first few weeks,” writes Lee, “I was lost without knowing I was lost. I was searching with a deep belief that all would be well, not out of resilience or hope but out of ignorant bliss….My world was that [hospital] room, and in that room my struggles had little measured impact.” Unable to retain information, suffering from aphasia, and repeatedly rereading the same page of Slaughterhouse-Five over and over again, Lee eventually realized that she had to learn to confront older, deep-seated attitudes about her body and brain. She contemplates the years slavishly devoted to using her prized brain to subdue a seemingly undesirable body. That introspection, in turn, opened new doorways onto troubled relationships with her traumatized parents and increasingly distant husband. Forced to compensate for the dead part of her brain, Lee slowly achieved a new sense of gratitude for the body she had previously so reviled and mistreated. The journey of self-discovery is given an illuminating boost when the hole in her heart is finally repaired. With careful thought and new understanding, the author explores the enduring mind-body connection with herself at the nexus of it all.
A fascinating exploration of personal identity from a writer whose body is, thankfully, “no longer at war.”Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242215-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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