A profoundly moving memoir.
The children’s book author shows masterful control in this memoir of a life careening beyond his control.
This is a sequel of sorts to Crawling: A Father’s First Year (2006), but it’s also a very different book. As Cooper writes of that book, “it’s short and upbeat, though there’s one sentence about not wanting to become the parent of a child with cancer that makes me suck in my breath.” In this short memoir, the author has become exactly what he didn’t want to be in that throwaway line. It starts with a “bump” on the first page, which Cooper happens to feel when his 4-year-old daughter is sitting on her father’s lap watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two pages later, the bump that he might have been tempted to dismiss has been diagnosed as “a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms’ tumor, a ‘good cancer,’ a funny pairing of words.” Two pages later, it is “stage three, which is not good.” Before the end of this chapter, the author has begun to “wonder if there are elements of this story that may get away from me.” He is right to wonder, for under this illusion of stylistic control lies a cauldron of powerful emotion that can erupt at any moment. And it does, to the author’s surprise at his own anger, which embarrasses him a little in retrospect and surprises readers, because the prose is so measured. But this is a book in which the subtlety of surface control sustains an exquisite tension with the turmoil beneath, as the author finds others “looking at a man who is a little unhinged.” His daughter is fine, for now, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and periodic scans. The changes in her are mainly the ones any girl might experience from the ages of 4 to 8. But her father is transformed into a writer who must leave “an angry island” and reconcile the world’s horrors with its ineffable beauty.
A profoundly moving memoir.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87123-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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