Roiling, confrontational family portrait.
A tenaciously engaged memoir from Levine (Harmful to Minors, 2002, etc.) about her relationship with her parents as her father drifts deeper and deeper into Alzheimer’s.
It starts with Lillian and Stan Levine’s 50th wedding anniversary party, as Stan rambles on and on and on. “For those who do not know what is happening to him, the party is Dad’s coming out as a dement,” writes his daughter. For his family—feisty, contentious, left-wing, New York Jewish intellectuals among whom the brain reigns supreme—it is the cruel reality. But in the bigger picture, reactions to Stan’s ailment reflect our hyper-cognitive society, she argues: “We consider dementia not just a disease, but a living death.” Delving into the literature of Alzheimer’s for answers and writing with a sure hand on unstable ground, Levine explores the disease’s social effects. “More than social normality comes with language; personhood does,” and as the first goes, so, our society deems, does the latter. Once, “the aged lived among us all, ill or hale, helpful or inconvenient, respected or humiliated in differing measure.” That is often no longer the case; we have systematically “stripped elderly people of the roles that had sustained meaning in their lives through mandatory retirement, social isolation, and the disintegration of traditional family ties.” After her mother starts to crumble under the responsibility, starting a new relationship as the old one slips away, Levine must confront the idea of putting her father into a nursing home. Her narrative is emotional as well as intellectual: she grapples with her feelings for her father, who was an overbearing, provocative (and occasionally violent) lord of misrule; she considers and rejects taking him under her own care; she jousts with her mother over her seeming abandonment of her husband. It is a maddening, very human dance, and Levine gets it down just right.
Roiling, confrontational family portrait.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2230-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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