It didn’t come cheap, but Fuchs has achieved a beautiful balance of humor and tragedy—all wrung from the same mess of real...
Wry account of a once-alienated daughter who becomes ever more entwined with her mother as the older woman makes a memorable decline.
Fuchs’s mother Lillian was always a force to be reckoned with. Born in 1908, she was the favored, blue-eyed daughter of a Jewish immigrant in the hat trade. She got into Radcliffe in the age of quotas, dropped out and married, then bucked convention again to become a divorced single mother who ran her own business. Seductive, a snappy dresser, and an unabashed narcissist, Lillian makes for a meaty protagonist. Fuchs herself seems perennially surprised by this woman who happens to be her mother; by turns, she’s bemused, frustrated, hysterical, terrified, angry, and entertained. Her memories of childhood are far from warm and cozy, but since she’s done just fine for herself by the standard measures of family and career, the discomfort of watching young Elinor left behind with her grandmother as her mother surges ever forward in her career is tempered by the knowledge that Fuchs is now a professor at Yale with two daughters and a life partner. In any case, there’s little room for pity or censure as the reader is carried along by a great story. Lillian, an adamantly independent woman all her life, finally needs to be taken care of. She’s mostly lost her mind, and although she’ll never really know it, she needs her daughter. Fuchs combines her account of the weirdness of caring for a physically competent, mentally absent woman with episodes from their shared past. Her brisk prose effectively captures Lillian’s energy, the oddities of communication that Alzheimer’s imposes, the endless grind of arranging and placating caregivers, and her own emotional landscape when she finds herself trapped in a state of emergency that lasts a decade.
It didn’t come cheap, but Fuchs has achieved a beautiful balance of humor and tragedy—all wrung from the same mess of real life.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6317-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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