A heartening and well-told family story.
A father pays tribute to his son, who inspired many with his optimism during 39 years of living with a severe disability.
Debut author and freelance agricultural writer Boone’s middle son, Peter (1975-2014), had spina bifida. He was born with a high, large, open wound on his back and was given a poor prognosis. Luckily, medical advances made Peter part of the first generation of spina bifida patients to reach adulthood. But his was no easy ride: he was soon wheelchair-bound and over the years endured 80-plus surgeries and multiple hospitalizations. A particularly disastrous 1987 operation left Peter reliant on oxygen and a ventilator and unable to eat or speak normally; for nearly nine years, he communicated chiefly by mouthing words. It’s impressive how conventional a life Peter led despite intense physical trials: from elementary school onward, he attended regular classes; he learned to drive a customized van and attended his prom; and after getting an associate’s degree, he worked as a tutor at his old high school. Boone skillfully cuts between Peter’s major achievements and the challenges of daily life with a disabled family member; in particular, he is careful not to neglect struggles his wife and other sons faced. While telling Peter’s story as a straightforward yet absorbing chronological narrative, the author occasionally pauses to thank those who supported his family: Peter’s doctors, their Quaker congregation, and Joni and Friends (a charity founded by quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada), whose camps Peter attended and then volunteered in. Peter’s obsessive love of sports, especially football and the Purdue teams, is a strong theme running throughout the moving book—“although he couldn’t be an athlete in body, he was a great one in spirit,” Boone writes. Crucially, Peter and his family never stopped seeing the lighter side of things, as in a vivid scene in which flooding forced them to deliver Peter home by tractor. It’s no wonder that his high school instituted the “Peter Boone Mental Attitude Award” in his honor or that 400 attended his memorial service when he succumbed to a coronary thrombosis.
A heartening and well-told family story.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7878-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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