Rarely is a memoir so worth the terrible effort.
Irish-American O’Hagan, born and raised in Queens, takes her heart and squeezes until it purely aches as she relates how her son’s life came to a premature close.
It was a terrible family legacy: her mother’s unknown uncles, and then her mother’s brother all had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and died young. DMD is hereditary, carried by females in one miserable gene that O’Hagan passes on to her younger son, Jamie. The author sings here of her father, a friend of the bottle who loved and battered and never shirked the hard acts of grace; of her mother, who sprinkled hope like fairy dust but also threw a Thanksgiving turkey at Dad when he arrived drunk for the festivities. But mostly she sings of the scalding innocence of Jamie. O’Hagan knew she was taking a chance when she got pregnant; she was a carrier and already had one healthy son. She tried denial when Jamie couldn’t negotiate the steps of the school bus, when he fell and fell and yelled for the other kids to wait up. Then she had to accept the horrible truth, and she searingly chronicles the essential “daily-ness” of DMD. She rejects the experts’ consoling advice that “successful adaptation does not depend on an accurate perception of reality”; she tells her son that “he [won’t] live to be old, that he shouldn’t worry about how long but instead, how deep.” Jamie partakes; O’Hagan slumps, overwhelmed by his effort and pain Her mother calls her on it: “Get up out of that goddam bed,” Mom snaps. “You’re falling down on the job.” Emotions come off the page like radioactive waves. When Jamie says, “I guess I’ll never have a girlfriend,” his mother can only reply, “I guess not.” Then, at age 24, Jamie dies in Long Island’s Stony Brook Hospital; she’s besieged by emptiness, grief, guilt, and a love that challenges her sanity, until she is able to focus on the husband and son she has left.
Rarely is a memoir so worth the terrible effort.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32955-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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