A year of grief and love, forthrightly revealed.
All was going well for character actor Beaver (featured on HBO’s Deadwood) and his wife Cecily (acting teacher, casting director, daughter of comic Don Adams) when suddenly their American Dream turned into their personal nightmare.
Jim’s father, Cecily’s father and other family members became ill. Their toddler Maddie was diagnosed as autistic. Then, just when the Beaver family was preparing to move into their new home, Cecily was diagnosed with cancer. By spring she was dead. To help cope, Jim composed thoughtful midnight e-mails for 150 family and friends. During the course of a year, his messages gained wide circulation by being forwarded to thousands of readers. Edited for this book, they form a genuine memorial: sometimes clinical, frequently sentimental, always openhearted. Early, hopeful entries tell of chemo, transfusions, blood tests, oncology consults, CT scans and MRIs. It wasn’t long before Cecily developed an inflammation surrounding her heart and pneumonia that required a ventilator. Throughout the winter of his young wife’s illness, Beaver maintained that “the fight has only begun and has a long, long way to go.” Readers, of course, know the inevitable end. After this devastating loss, Jim’s nocturnal musings turned to his daughter, who with early intervention soon shed the diagnosis of autism, along with memories of her lost mother. The author warmly acknowledges the friends, family, helpers, babysitters, companions and bringers of good thoughts, food and love. His passionate book is about how we mourn, a topic familiar sooner or later to every reader. Beaver treats it with uncommon honesty and a bit of wisdom.
A year of grief and love, forthrightly revealed.Pub Date: April 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15564-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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