An uncommon tale of brotherly love, and a passionate defense of the notion that dignity belongs as much to the mad as to the rest of us. Like Susan Sheehan's Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, this volume enters profoundly into the life and suffering of a man with a severe mental illness. In this case, however, novelist Neugeboren (Before My Life Began, 1985, etc.) is writing about his younger brother, Robert, who was first hospitalized at the age of 19, after trying to kill his father. Robert's life acutely poses the question of when, and how, originality and eccentricity prefigure and finally cross the border into madness. Robert was a charming and gifted child during the Neugeboren brothers' boyhood in Brooklyn in the 1940s and '50s. (Robert's wit and gentle spirit are everywhere manifest in the letters, quoted here at length, that he wrote from various institutions.) But finally eccentricity became disorderliness and confusion, and Robert began a lifetime's journey in and out of institutions where he was treated by an ever-changing but consistently incompetent cast of therapists, on and off of a pharmacy-full of medications, in and out of the latest ``miracle'' treatments. How did the promising boy who beguiled everyone with his song-and-dance routines become the man whose narrow life centers on halfway houses, menial work, and occasional visits to Atlantic City? Neugeboren, who rejects the reduction of mental illness to biochemical imbalances, explores their family's troubled past (a father who was a failure as a breadwinner, a domineering mother who scorned her husband, doted on Robert, and denigrated Jay), and his own adult life as the brother of a mentally ill man, single father of three children, and son of a mother with Alzheimer's. A rich, textured, and deeply sad tale emerges, enlarged by Neugeboren's persistent belief that in telling Robert's story, he can ``be a witness to his life, in all its complexity, uniqueness, hope, and despair'' and make it ``fully human.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14968-5
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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