Riveting and disturbing.
The chilling true story of an ordinary wife, mother, and hospice nurse who was raped and abducted by a stranger who had already killed her husband.
Sharp begins her story in April 1998, on the Monday afternoon she decided to plant roses outside her dream house before leaving to work the night shift at the hospice. The house was in Newark, Delaware, and Sharp and husband Nino were soon to celebrate 25 years of happy and fulfilling matrimony. As Sharp ponders all the what-ifs of that day—if it had rained, or if she had gone shopping—she recalls how her husband came home at 3 p.m. and went inside for a nap. Her roses planted, Sharp headed through the garage and into the kitchen, where someone hit her hard, her glasses fell off, and she fell to the floor. The next moment her assailant took her to the basement, raped her, then held a knife to her throat, tied her up, wrapped her in a quilt, and carried her to his car. In his home, more rapes followed, and she was kept gagged, blindfolded, and hogtied. On Tuesday evening, when her attacker switched on the radio, Sharp learned that Nino was dead and she was a suspect. She managed to escape when her captor left on Friday night for work, and the remainder of the narrative details her emotional and physical recovery, public and family reactions to her plight, and the trial itself. It was a daunting and emotionally fraught experience; the defense attorney tried to find inconsistencies in her story and even suggested that the accused was kind when he gave her water to drink. Though it took time and help, Sharp put her life back together, though like most crime victims, she cannot completely forget.
Riveting and disturbing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2916-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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