Next book

HEAD CASE

MY BRAIN AND OTHER WONDERS

A beautifully wrenching memoir as piercing as smelling salts.

The story of a woman with a hole in her brain the size of a lemon.

We meet Cohen when she is 26 years old. For many of those years, she has suffered from disorientation, exhaustion, and not knowing left from right, which in turn have given her a shattering combination of insecurity, fear, shame, anxiety and panic. “I can’t judge distance, time, or space, read maps, travel independently without getting lost; or drive…you would never realize that as I’m walking next to you down the street, you are leading us both,” she writes. The author is verbally dexterous, however, and her memoir is rich with yearning and ache, conveying a scrunched sense of claustrophobia and imagery of cinematic quality. Throughout the book, Cohen ably conveys the gravity of her condition: “Being a fuck-up is an excuse as flimsy as it is sturdy. It’s a container for the cluttered detritus of all my smaller mistakes”; “I am thrown into the adult world like a match into gasoline. Burning down everything in my path is an organic reaction.” This is the story of her days from her first diagnosis—with digressions into her youth, when doctors were clueless about the causes of her condition—until today, in her early 30s. She follows her tracks through college and dialectical behavioral therapy, her tender and grueling first real romantic relationship, graduate school in writing, and the simple, everyday activities that spook her, such as walking out the door. This is not a short period of time, and the writing has a vital compression and severity, which is likely the result of a lifetime of an “anger, sadness, and pain...so epic as to only be properly graphed seismically.” The author also delivers flashes of humor to add levity to the proceedings.

A beautifully wrenching memoir as piercing as smelling salts.

Pub Date: May 19, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-62779-189-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview