Wrenchingly painful, but intensely affecting.
Novelist Burgess (Exposures, 2005, etc.) expressively and excruciatingly chronicles her emotional struggle when cancer afflicts her husband.
It may seem odd that nearly every scene is infused with aromas, plant life, outdoor atmospherics, colors, food and wine, but this approach is appropriate: From the moment Burgess met and fell in love with Ken Grunzweig in 1988, it was apparent that their shared appreciation of the sensuous pleasures of being human was a central element in their bond. She was 31, really in love for the first time; he was 44 and had endured the gruesome deaths of two wives. Despite these traumas, Ken remained an unusually self-aware, evolved, giving man. The couple continued in thrall to each other as they raised two kids, first in the San Francisco Bay area and then in Spokane, Wash. Fourteen years into their joyful marriage, cancer struck Ken. Narrating the subsequent barrage of medical treatments and uncertainty, Burgess lyrically and perceptively explores how the body, emotions and experiences are connected, how love and misfortune affect that landscape. The author’s strained relationship with her mother, and Ken’s with his adult daughter, further illuminate these inquiries. Describing chemotherapy medicines as “priceless bags of chemical hope” may seem excessive, but Burgess’s romantic prose only rarely seems overwritten. In the context of her attempts to unearth understanding from such a devastating event, the gush of feeling tugs the reader along on a difficult ride during which insight is the only comfort and stabbing inevitability underlies every embrace and home-cooked meal. Burgess self-identifies as a proponent of science over religion, but there is a generous helping of “Spiritual Lite” (the title of one chapter), including a vision of the dead. These forays into the mystical do not go unexamined; the author examines how the idea of “God” helps her and Ken to confront his illness.
Wrenchingly painful, but intensely affecting.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2859-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
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