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THE GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR

A FATHER'S QUEST TO UNDERSTAND HIS DAUGHTER'S SUICIDE

Brooks explains Casey’s disorder and available help in terms that will help anyone struggling with a difficult child....

In his first book, Brooks shares his search for answers about his adopted daughter and the unknown childhood trauma that drove her to suicide at age 17.

The author and his wife, Erika, knew when they adopted Casey that she had been premature, her twin had died at birth, and that she had spent two months in an incubator. At 14 months, she couldn’t even sit up, but she developed quickly after adoption, achieving normalcy by age 2. Living in Marin County in California, Brooks describes their struggle and confusion with parenting issues. But theirs was an especially difficult child. Casey was given to tantrums and intense rages, even at age 3. The author describes her early childhood in intensive detail, grasping at memories of her toys, music, the clothes she wore, and how gently they brushed her hair. He also tells of her explosions and screaming and their attempts at discipline, followed by acquiescence caused by their fear of another explosion. An analyst recommended a book on attachment disorder, which Brooks read and cast aside as little help. Casey’s self-loathing and her perfectionist inability to tolerate failure caused rows that left her parents at their wits’ end. Eventually, she gained early acceptance to Bennington in Vermont, wanting to be as far away as possible. So why did she drive to the Golden Gate Bridge and leap to her death? The author’s description of their anguish is heart-wrenching, and his desperate search for answers and guilt for not doing the right thing without knowing what it was reveals the utter helplessness of suicide survivors. Brooks and his wife left no stone unturned, consulting adoption experts, orphanages in Eastern Europe, and child trauma experts. As he discovered Casey’s problems, he suffered even further pain and trauma, since the answer was there and no one had told him.

Brooks explains Casey’s disorder and available help in terms that will help anyone struggling with a difficult child. Teachers, analysts, and parents alike can find relief and hope in this book.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-2834-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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