A candid memoir that reminds readers of the role attitude plays in success.
An inspiring tale of one man’s triumph over his challenges.
Page is a “blind man who refused to accept a passive role” in his life, a theme of resilience that runs through this compelling memoir. Page details not only his own challenges as a man born without sight, but also the surrounding adversities that his family members fought and overcame, setting a backdrop of expectation for him to do the same. Page’s particular form of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, runs throughout his family, affecting his mother and cousins, but it afflicts him most severely as he has never known what it is to see. However, Page grew up with the understanding that the world was his to conquer despite whatever limitations he might have. Born on a farm in Missouri, every member of the family was expected to pitch in. From an early age, Page was expected to draw water from the well and carry it to the chickens, something he had to do several times a day. As he grew older, Page was involved in repair work and tree cutting, activities that most people would not ask of a blind child. Page’s sense of being just like everyone else was reinforced when representatives from the Missouri School for the Blind recruited Page for their school and his parents refused, reinforcing the viewpoint that Page was entitled to the same life as everyone else. This attitude continued to shape Page as he became an adult, going on to earn a doctorate and serving on the legislature of his town, advocating for the disabled. Throughout Page’s life, it is he who must remind everyone around him of his capability—something he never forgets and continues to prove with every milestone he achieves. Richly woven with anecdotes and honesty, Page’s story is humbling as he achieves more in his life than many who have the ability to see. Because of Page’s determination, no obstacle is big enough to stop him from succeeding, and his story is an important one to read.
A candid memoir that reminds readers of the role attitude plays in success.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1458214195
Page Count: 198
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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