Using clever commentary and realistic reassurance, King’s comforting memoir details his struggle with early-onset Parkinson’s disease.
Squirming in a doctor’s chair, convinced nothing is wrong with him, King sees the problem arrive in a storm of immediacy and doubt. His doctor informs him that, due to symptoms of aching, stiffness and limping, he is likely in the beginning stages of early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Stubborn and opinionated, King is almost insulted by the diagnosis. He desperately attempts to reason with his doctor: “[B]ut I’m too young for Parkinson’s….[I]t’s only on one side,” he says. “I don’t shake all that much.” As the memoir continues, readers are exposed to the idiosyncrasies, past and present, that have built his distinctive outer toughness and inner insecurity. King the author develops a strong portrait of King the protagonist, testing his strength of character against the traumas of a strenuous, sometimes-impossible coping process. The details of his childhood, military career and marriage portray a complex array of emotions that move the reader through the distress of Parkinson’s and the effect it has on his life. Despite the subject matter, however, the outlook isn’t bleak. The author balances the strife of deterioration, both mental and physical, with sharp wit and dry sarcasm: “ ‘executive dysfunction’…it sounds like a bad quote from a Dilbert cartoon, it’s related to the ability to multitask, to think abstractly, to remember and apply facts, and to interpret motivations and read situations effectively.” This harmonious balance gives the narrative an ultimately positive outlook, lightening the intense subject matter. The memoir outlines the achievements and disappointments of the coping process, assuring readers that no process works the same for everyone and that the ultimate medicines are love and support from one’s family. The text can be repetitive in parts, and certain digressions into back story—particularly the sections about his time in the military—slow the narrative’s momentum. Yet as a whole, King’s story is humbling and inspiring, sparkling with honesty, humor and faith.
An engrossing, informative read for anyone intrigued by the concept of finding peace and happiness while in the grips of terminal illness.
Pub Date: April 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500228422
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
