Artistically rather bumpy, but Collins’s earnestness will touch most readers all the same.
Collins’s debut memoir chronicles his wife’s losing battle with breast cancer and his subsequent struggle to raise their two-year-old daughter alone.
Three months after their wedding, Louise Collins became pregnant with a much-wanted child. Seven months into the pregnancy she found a lump in her breast: a series of biopsies was performed, a malignancy confirmed. The physicians induced labor at eight months so Louise could begin six months of chemotherapy. When daughter Robin was six months old, the young couple found out that the cancer had metastasized to Louise’s lungs, necessitating a stem cell transplant. Despite these medical heroics, she died. David was thrown into a tailspin, never really getting the chance to grieve since he was instantly submerged in the grinding routine of raising a very young child alone. “I find myself managing [Robin] more than actually raising her,” he confesses at one point. “I am a man, after all.” While the story is quite moving, the writing is wildly uneven. The author’s description of slow footsteps on the stairs as his father comes to deliver the news of Louise’s death is heartfelt in its simplicity. Other scenes could have benefited from heavier editing. When he learns that the cancer has returned, Collins yells, “You motherscratchers why? Why why why why why you motherscratchers why!?” While Louise and Robin are depicted (perhaps inevitably) in a saintly fashion, Collins is less compassionate toward himself. He describes stumbling through his job, all the while relishing the peace and quiet of the office compared to the chaos of home. By the end, the author has accepted his position as a survivor with tremendous responsibilities and is ready to rejoin the living.
Artistically rather bumpy, but Collins’s earnestness will touch most readers all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-86538-107-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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