A tender meditation on the hope that one can discover in the darkest despair.
In this memoir, a woman recollects how faith helped her endure extraordinary travails.
In 1994, debut author Roby was happily married and preparing to start a new job as a teacher. Then her husband, Henry, suddenly and inexplicably died, and at the age of 25, she found herself a single mother of one child, seven-and-a-half months pregnant with another. In 1997, when her daughter, Jordan, was 2-and-a-half years old, she suddenly collapsed and was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital. She suffered from congestive heart failure, and her doctors determined that her heart was so weak that she was a candidate for a transplant. She was approved for the procedure and transferred to a new hospital, while Roby stayed at a nearby Ronald McDonald house. The operation’s risks were considerable; even if it was successful, there was still a possibility that Jordan would need another transplant a decade or so later. The surgery went well, and the road to recovery seemed promising, if fraught with challenges. However, a few years later, Jordan fell seriously ill again, and her organs started to shut down. Doctors attempted to save her life, but the strain proved too much for the young girl, who finally died. The bulk of Roby’s recollection is devoted to her account of Jordan’s struggle to stay alive, but she also discusses her own youthful Christian awakening and the abuse that she weathered as a child. Roby tells this heartbreaking tale with affecting emotion, but she’s also relentlessly optimistic, repeatedly cataloging the many things for which she’s deeply grateful. The whole story feels like less of a lament than a kind of love letter to those who supported her during her time of profound distress. She also provides a thoughtful reflection on the faith that sustained her through her many trials, offering a kind of Christian theodicy: “There is evil in this world. Some bear witness to it, while others endure its devastation and subsequent hardship. In acknowledging there is evil, one must also acknowledge there is good, for one cannot exist without the other.”
A tender meditation on the hope that one can discover in the darkest despair.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6140-5
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2017
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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