Sustaining an appropriate sympathy for this character is, sadly, not easy.
Cancer chronicle from a young Glamour editor that manages to be loutish and unlovely.
The unspeakable happened to Zammett, an attractive 23-year-old with a fashionable magazine job in New York City, a strong Irish family on Long Island and a oving boyfriend. After a routine medical checkup, she was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). This mysterious cancer is neither hereditary nor caused by environmental factors; Zammett’s oncologist likened contracting CML to being hit by lightning. The only known cure, her doctor explained, was a bone marrow transplant that required a genetically matched donor, had a 15 percent mortality rate and rendered survivors infertile. On the other hand, there was the miraculous, newly FDA-approved experimental drug Gleevec, which killed the cancer cells and left the others intact, though it did not cure the disease. The author and her parents embarked for the Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, where the drug trial took place. They were accompanied by a photo crew, because Zammett was writing a cancer diary for her magazine. “A Glamour staffer shares her battle to live,” regrettably, suggests this book’s overall level of insight and profundity. Certainly we’re relieved to read that within a year Zammett’s cancer was in deep remission. But despite the narrative’s inherent drama and suspense, it’s hard to get around the trashy colloquialisms of this University of Tennessee party girl. Each paragraph, it seems, has its own equivalent of the egregiously lazy (“I had pretty much learned to suck up the suckiness of the shots”), while vulgarisms from “fuck,” to “butt crack” abound. Of the many grossly superficial statements made in her affluent, competitive family, perhaps the most offensive is: “With cancer treatment . . . it’s all about who you know.” It’s no surprise that when her sister is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, they invoke the “healing power of shopping” and splurge on $300 Chanel sunglasses.
Sustaining an appropriate sympathy for this character is, sadly, not easy.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-643-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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