An encouraging, heartwarming story about the strength of the human spirit.
Uplifting memoir by a young man determined to regain a full life after suffering a devastating spinal injury at age 24.
Clark, whose dive into the shallow end of a pool left him paralyzed from the neck down, is today, at age 30, running a thriving business whose profits are helping other victims of spinal-cord injuries. His story of recovery is full of grit, perseverance, resourcefulness and a lot of support from a loving family. Years of physical therapy followed the accident, often with therapists who seemed to be urging him to accept his fate and to learn to live with his limitations. The author, who refused to give up hope, tried acupressure, chiropractic and hypnotherapy; he researched innovative treatments, even going to China for stem-cell surgery and signing up for aggressive, inventive clinical trials. Gradually, he recovered feeling in some parts of his body, and he continues to hope for further improvements. Because the injury to his spinal cord cost him the ability to sweat, his skin began to have serious problems. To alleviate them, he turned to his father, a doctor familiar with alternative medicine, and together they experimented with dozens of botanical extracts. One of them, jasmine absolute, became the principal ingredient of a helpful cream, whose use soon spread to his father’s patients and to others. From this he got the idea of starting a company and developing a line of skin-care products. Before his injury, Clark had worked at Harper’s Bazaar, and his contacts in the fashion world helped him promote his new company, Clark Botanicals. As a paraplegic, he had long been an admirer of Christopher Reeve, and a portion of the profits from his firm supports the work of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, an organization for which Clark serves as a national ambassador and fundraiser. The book contains vivid descriptions of what it feels like to be paralyzed and helpless and reveals the negative attitudes of some in health care toward patients with disabling injuries.
An encouraging, heartwarming story about the strength of the human spirit.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2343-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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