The prose reads like journal entries or letters to readers, punctuated by sometimes-trite remarks: “Death is the ultimate...
NPR host Rehm (Life with Maxie, 2010, etc.) reflects on loneliness, loss, and aging.
“For fifty-four years I have been a wife,” Rehm writes in a memoir more notable for candor than artfulness. “Now I am widow. Am I someone new?” In the mid-2000s, her husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, marking a profound change in their lives. As he gradually succumbed to the illness, the author found herself increasingly alone: the couple slept in separate bedrooms because of John’s involuntary thrashing, and in 2012, he moved into an assisted living facility because he needed 24-hour care. Despondent over his condition, he begged for help to end his life. “We had promised that we would do everything we could to support each other’s wishes in the face of debilitating and unalterable conditions,” Rehm writes. But she was helpless, as were John’s physicians. Making his own decision, John refused food, water, or medicines, and after 10 days, “surely the longest of my life,” the author admits, he died. Rehm was beset by guilt, worrying that she should have given up her career to care for John during the final year of his life. As she looks back at their sometimes-rocky marriage, she blames herself for not being passive or submissive enough to please a man who wanted to dominate. The author is often overcome by grief, not only for John, but “for our youth, for our love, for our happiness.” Widowhood is not the only identity change that Rehm has faced. She wonders who she will be once she retires and how, beginning her eighth decade, she can continue as “a fully engaged human being.”
The prose reads like journal entries or letters to readers, punctuated by sometimes-trite remarks: “Death is the ultimate finality,” she writes. “There is no turning back.” Nevertheless, her perspectives on old age are brave and uplifting.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87528-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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