Perhaps the greatest achievement with this book, which brings to light one of the great medical tragedies of the 20th...
A clinical psychologist’s memoir about how she uncovered the truth behind the family secret that surrounded her disability.
Cronin was just 3 years old when she realized that while her siblings had “two legs and a bunch of toes,” her own body ended at the knees. When she asked why, her Catholic mother would say that it was because God had chosen her “to carry the cross.” Yet none of the other members of her family ever treated her as though she were different. That all changed when she entered school. She wore prosthetic legs but discovered that she would have to fight to win other people’s acceptance. Despite her physical challenges and the fact that her mother would be diagnosed with mental illness, Cronin still managed to have a relatively normal adolescence, which included parties, boyfriends and a healthy dose of sexual experimentation. It wasn’t until college, though, that Cronin became painfully aware that she wasn’t just, as one therapist suggested, a “mermaid” making her way in a two-legged world: She was disabled. Anger drove her to alcohol and to the destruction of meaningful personal relationships. At the same time, it also fueled her break with traditional Catholic expectations that she dedicate her life solely to motherhood and pushed her to demand answers about why she had been born legless. Investigation into her parents’ pasts finally confirmed what she had long suspected: that it was her mother’s use of thalidomide during pregnancy that had caused her deformities. Cronin’s confrontation with family secrets eventually allowed her to enjoy a successful career and marriage.
Perhaps the greatest achievement with this book, which brings to light one of the great medical tragedies of the 20th century, is that she is able to tell her story with a winning combination of candor, grace and humor.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08901-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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