A touching and smoothly translated account.
A heartwarming memoir of a boy, born without arms or legs, who transforms Japanese attitudes towards the disabled.
When Ototake’s mother first saw her deformed baby 24 years ago, she responded with joy and love. This made all the difference. Both Ototake’s parents and the resourceful teachers of the mainstream school he attended refused to patronize him, and they held him to all the normal expectations of a growing boy: he narrated his grade-school class play, for example, and he eventually left his wheelchair to participate in gym exercises and class outings. Both psychologically and physically, tough love worked. Ototake developed from a bossy kid who expected veneration for his motorized wheelchair and unique body to one who gratefully and naturally accepted the special “Oto-chan rules” (invented by his classmates) during recess sports or swimming requirements. He underwent a few operations but was healthy enough to get into a fight, and to excel at studies, the chess team, and the student council. In time Ototake was accepted to an elite high school, and he became an important member of the football team (using his computer skills to plot strategy and keep statistics). American readers unfamiliar with the Orient will be struck by the homogeneity and discipline of Japanese society (where differences stand out and academic pressures are intense) as it is portrayed here. For his part, Ototake was amazed, during a trip to the US, to see how many accommodations are made here for the handicapped, and how many disabled Americans have the self-esteem to dress well.
A touching and smoothly translated account.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 4-7700-2500-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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