Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.
A firsthand account of two lives that came to tragic ends.
Journalist Orkin (Ground Zero Wars, 2017, etc.) met investigative reporter Mike Ruppert in 2004 at a symposium marking the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and they later moved in together. Ten years later after their first meeting, after Ruppert committed suicide, Orkin began to produce blog entries, compiled in this book, as a way to explain his troubled state of mind. As she frankly states, “This is a flesh and blood, warts-and-all portrait written in the belief that in the end, Mike and his transcendent work and critically important ideas will prevail.” One of the more harrowing sequences involves Ruppert’s self-imposed exile in Venezuela, where he was alarmed by mysterious physical ailments and disillusioned with the country’s “Cuban-style medical system.” Here, the author includes a series of frantic emails, some her own, that effectively capture an escalating sense of confusion and panic. Some readers may be put off by Orkin’s nonstandard capitalization in these exchanges, but overall, this is a minor issue, as is the blog posts’ occasional deviation from chronological order. For instance, there’s a eulogy for Ruppert in the middle of the text and an account of the author’s first meeting with her subject at the very end. The lion’s share of the book recounts the period after Ruppert’s return to the United States, when he lived with the author in Brooklyn Heights in New York City. Readers will enjoy Orkin’s more deliberative style here, featuring solid narration and revealing dialogue, as she tells of how Ruppert’s mental health struggles and painful physical issues tested their relationship; it contrasts sharply with previous, hastily composed correspondence. The book also includes a much shorter work that’s devoted to Orkin’s mother’s life and final months. It opens with the author’s poignant assertion that her parent “did not go gentle into that good night.” Many will identify with the author’s feelings of helplessness and frustration in the face of woefully inadequate health care and social services systems. Her story of the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease may be universal in nature, but the specific details are powerful.
Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5007-7161-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
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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