Bold, charming, and inspirational.
A Californian polio survivor shares memories of her challenging but fulfilling life in this debut memoir.
Falk-Allen remembers being what she refers to as a “normie”—“what the ‘crip’ community…calls non-disabled people.” Her memoir opens with her as a toddler in 1950, running carefree down West 109th Street in the Westmont neighborhood of Los Angeles. This was her last memory of running; at 3 years old, she contracted spinal polio, causing paralysis of her right leg. Doctors said that she’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Falk-Allen recounts her two weeks in quarantine, which was followed by six months in a rehab center that felt like imprisonment. She began physical therapy and, contrary to her doctor’s initial prognosis, was able to learn how to walk with assistance from crutches and a leg brace. But after she was released, she faced new adversity as she tried to assimilate as a “normie.” She charts her growing interest in boys, her high school fascination with rock ’n’ roll during the mid-1960s, her time as a co-ed at San José State University and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and her development into a confident young woman. Along the way, the author shares many painful memories; as a child, she says, she was injected with a muscle relaxant every day for 180 consecutive days, which resulted in her becoming “permanently needle-averse.” But she recalls her difficulties with unflinching prose, and her directness and dry humor are captivating: “I have never felt I had the choice to Scarlett O’Hara my experience (‘I’ll think about that later’).” Some readers may interpret this candor as overly abrupt, or even unfunny; the author is aware of this possibility, but she knows her target audience: “if you are a fan of Monty Python, I ask you to remember the irony of the song, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’—sung while Brian was being crucified—as you read on.” Overall, this is a frank, no-nonsense account of living with a disability edged with a razor-sharp wit.
Bold, charming, and inspirational.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-391-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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