A slim volume on the learned truths of living with limited vision by a man for whom the printed word has been the mainstay of both his professional and private life. Grunwald (One Man’s America, 1997), former editor-in-chief of all Time, Inc., publications and under President Reagan US ambassador to his native Austria, first wrote of his fading sight in a 1996 New Yorker piece, “Losing Vision.” That article is the genesis of the present work. Once diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), he began to learn everything possible not only about his condition but about the history of eye diseases and their treatment, and he shares some arcane tidbits here, describing ancient Egyptian remedies and revealing how the eye injuries of WWII fighter pilots led to refinements of cataract surgery. On a more personal note, as Grunwald’s vision fades, he becomes a “visual glutton,” storing up precious images of beloved faces and scenes. He dredges up visual memories from his childhood and muses about the art of seeing, the remaining pleasures of museum going, the hazards and rewards of traveling, the difficulties of ordinary social intercourse when eye contact is missing, and the enormous frustration involved in reading and writing. Perhaps the most poignant sentence in the book is his quiet lament, “My books are still more than furniture, but less than the living things they used to be.” While the physical effects of AMD are formidable, he has found the emotional ones more troublesome. He admits to bouts of anger and depression, but tries to fight back with humor and by making a game out of the need for coping strategies. In the process, he has learned patience, humility, and, reluctantly, acceptance of membership in the society known as the “handicapped.” Grunwald’s eyesight may have become cloudy, but the picture he creates for us is crystal clear.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40422-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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