An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness.
A brave, moving story of a son’s devotion to his dying father.
Novelist and memoirist Thorndike (Another Way Home: A Family’s Journey Through Mental Illness, 1997, etc.) decided that when his father, a once indomitable editor at Life magazine and a reserved figure of authority, began to falter physically and mentally at the age of 92, the author was the one sibling who could put his life aside and take care of him. The decision to move from his farm in Ohio into his father’s home in Cape Cod was not altogether altruistic, he admits, since he had agreed with his brother that he would get paid for taking care of his increasingly forgetful father. When the author’s mother died more than 30 years before, “awash in depression, drugs and alcohol,” Thorndike had not been present, and he felt “negligent,” vowing “that when the time came I was going to look after my father.” The author is remarkably candid about his complex and changing feelings for his parents, who divorced ten years before his mother’s emotional slide. Neither of them was affectionate with each other or with their sons, a deep hurt that Thorndike rectified by his closeness with his own son. By caring for his confused, language-challenged father daily—feeding him, bathing him and thinking up ways to keep him stimulated—he attained enormous tenderness for and understanding of his father. Sadly, Thorndike’s father refused to talk openly about his mother, who had left her husband for other men who were more emotionally giving. The author makes the startling realization that he, by his sensuality and openness, had “become the man my mother wouldn’t leave.” Though some readers may criticize the author for being self-serving—he recognized that he had a better story in his father’s decline than the novel he was currently writing—Thorndike’s prose is serenely beautiful and his patience in caring for an Alzheimer’s patient is extremely admirable.
An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8040-1122-8
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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