A simple, straightforward story that successfully captures the complexities of growing up under the shadow of cancer.
From Paralympic skier Sundquist, an absorbing debut memoir about conquering nearly insurmountable odds.
At the age of nine, the author was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, which resulted in the amputation of his left leg at the hip. While he endured the unimaginable—the loss of a limb, a year-long stint of chemotherapy and the possibility that his cancer had returned—his narrative covers events that will be surprisingly familiar to most. His intimate encounters with cancer and its life-altering consequences form the backbone, but the story is really about a boy becoming a man, experiencing the trials, insecurities, rejections, triumphs and transformative realizations. Sundquist chronicles his diagnosis, surgery and treatment; he enumerates his fears, which have less to do with his amputation and being “normal” and more to do with meeting girls, making friends and finding purpose; he discusses the transformation of his family over the years, particularly that of his brother; he articulates the evolution of his faith. Compellingly, the author’s voice matures along with his childhood and adolescent self. Sundquist’s account of his battle with cancer and subsequent quest for the Paralympic ski team gives insight into a boy’s raw, honest experience as it occurs; the reader experiences the author’s boyhood as he did. The beginning is a little rocky, providing little exposition or context, but the author quickly reaches a steady stride that will keep readers transfixed.
A simple, straightforward story that successfully captures the complexities of growing up under the shadow of cancer.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02146-8
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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