Banal memoirs of woman who for the past 17 years has lived with Parkinson’s disease, a chronic neurological condition that affects movement, speech, and sometimes mental functioning. At age 47, Grady-Fitchett, a physically active woman, began experiencing the first symptoms: stiffness in her left arm and loss of dexterity in her left hand, Her clichÇ-ridden account of her life before and after diagnosis is divided into 63 “entries,” of which 54 are brief chapters of flat prose and 9 are much briefer, inoffensive poems. She tells sketchily of her first three marriages and divorces, her career as a model, and her entry into the Florida real-estate business. In the late 1970s, as her third marriage was ending, she bought a farm near Asheville, N.C. She moved there in 1983, stocked it with assorted animals, and lived there mostly alone until after her fourth marriage in 1990. Her strong-willed efforts to live independently on the farm and to care for her beloved horses, geese, and other creatures constitute a substantial portion of her memoirs, although there is mention of her creative-writing class and a short account of a legal squabble involving some Florida property. After 1991, the focus shifts to management of her gradually deteriorating health. She seeks advice from various doctors, tries various medications, and ultimately opts for a fetal-tissue transplant, in which tissue from an aborted fetus is implanted in the brain. In the book’s final entries, she tells of undergoing a battery of tests at the University of Colorado, where the surgery is to be performed. However, she has curiously chosen to end her memoirs while still awaiting the risky and experimental procedure that, if successful, could greatly improve her condition but, if unsuccessful, could leave her much worse off. Neither engaging nor informative; in fact, forgettable.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86490-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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