The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before...
A son’s unsentimental attempt to unravel the mysteries of his father’s life and come to terms with its contradictions.
Taylor, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, began writing this memoir after the death of his father, who for nearly two decades had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was either unable or unwilling to talk about his past. A few years earlier, the author had discovered that he had a stepbrother, a man whose memories of their father, in his pre-Parkinson’s days, were entirely unlike his own. Taylor reconstructs scenes from his childhood and adolescence to show his father’s downward spiral—from engaged parent to a man so deep in dementia that he could not distinguish his son from a giraffe and believed he was being kidnapped by enemies. Starting in his teens, Taylor began sharing with his mother the role of caretaker. He admits to being impatient, cross, frustrated and angered by his father’s strange behaviors. It was only later when he found clinical names for the symptoms that he could begin to understand what was happening, and with understanding came guilt over his shortcomings as a caretaker. Taylor’s frankness in describing his demented father may be seen as an invasion of privacy, but it is clear that he loved him and wanted desperately to know him and understand him, going to great lengths to track down his father’s relatives, former teaching colleagues and anyone who might provide helpful memories. While Taylor’s father remains something of an enigma to him and to the reader, the unpleasant truths about being a caretaker are made plain, as are the real horrors of witnessing the destruction of a loved one’s body, personality, mind and memory.
The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before giving to anyone touched by Parkinson’s disease.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-86207-955-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
