A terrifying bout of blindness stirs up recollections of a dark family story in this moving memoir. In the spring of 1991 Gorman lost sight first in one eye and then in the other, victim of a rare optic-nerve disorder. In her last hours of seeing, she pored over old family photos, fixing faces in her memory and recalling especially her beloved older brother, Robin. Diagnosed as an autistic and considered beyond help, Robin was institutionalized in 1961 at age 12. The author's memories of that family crisis and of other events in Robin's short and tragic life are artfully woven into the story of her own blindness. The grandson of a noted ophthalmologist and great-nephew of the poet Ogden Nash, Robin spent 12 years in a mental institution and was working as a dishwasher when he was killed by a car at age 31. Cut off from her own world by blindness, Gorman came to understand her brother's awful alienation. ``In my blindness,'' she says, ``I found my brother again and I followed him in his childhood footsteps. I stood inside his shadow and occupied his darkness.'' In the chapters recalling scenes from their childhood, Gorman skillfully adopts an ingenuous narrative voice, describing, with the naivetÇ of the child she was then, Robin's anguish, her mother's sadness, her father's and grandfather's firmness, and everyone's silences. It is an affecting account, as is her story of her own mysterious blindness. Gradually her sight does return, though imperfectly. The story comes full circle when she finds among Robin's belongings a piece of amber glass, one that he used as a child to spot crabs underwater, and discovers that with his ``seeing glass,'' colors sharpen, shadows appear, and once again she can read. Two memorable stories in one. (First serial to Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 2, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-061-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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