An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind...
An athlete's memoir about her ability to overcome personal tragedy and reinvent her life.
In 1986, Shepherd (On My Own Two Feet, 2007, etc.), a cross-country skier who was expected to represent her native Australia in the 1988 Olympics, was out on a bike ride with friends when a truck hit her. Her body was crushed: broken back and neck, five broken ribs, broken bones in her feet, contusions to her kidneys, hip and leg muscles torn from bones, extensive lacerations, and massive internal bleeding. Initially, her doctors weren't sure she'd survive. In lengthy detail, Shepherd shares how she spent the next six months in the hospital and in rehab, undergoing treatments and surgeries for her injuries, which left her with permanent disabilities that wiped out any chance of returning to elite athlete status. She tried returning to college but eventually found a new direction for her life in learning how to fly. She explains how she tackled the task of getting her pilot's license, using the same intensity of concentration and will she had used to train for competitive skiing events. From there, the memoir makes some rapid leaps in time as Shepherd chronicles her involvement with a fellow pilot; the births of her children; writing a book about her accident, which was made into a movie; becoming a TED talk speaker; and the dissolution of her marriage. The author places great emphasis on the first few years immediately following the accident that so drastically changed the trajectory of her life, but much of the material is similar to what she already chronicled in previous memoirs. Shepherd’s tenacity and determination are evident throughout the book, and her recovery is remarkable, but the narrative could have used more depth and introspection.
An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind of fulfilling life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62203-710-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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