An unusual point/counterpoint journal by a mother and her son, chronicling the painful years the son suffered from autism and his remarkable recovery. Rob and Judy Barron's first child was born autistic. From infancy, Sean was totally unresponsive to direction and affection. He was also hyperactive, destructive, and full of rage. In her frustration and bewilderment, Judy responded by screaming, threatening, and spanking. When the Barrons finally sought help, the professionals argued what was then the party line about childhood autism: that it was caused by ``refrigerator parents,'' especially an unfeeling mother. (Current thinking is that the cause is probably biochemical.) Medication, behavior modification, and institutionalization were recommended. The Barrons eventually tried all three but preferred having Sean at home. Both parents believed that behind the bizarre behavior was a terrified but normal child. Although age and academic success—he was able to attend public school—modulated Sean's behavior, it was not until he was 17 that the real Sean emerged. He graduated from high school, went on to college, and is now living on his own, with a responsible job. Sean's story is told in stereo, through interspersed paragraphs by mother and son. Judy is heroically honest about her own lack of control. Sean, whose memories go back to toddlerhood, makes clear how pleased he was by repetition—e.g., switching lights on and off; how angry he got when his arbitrary ``rules'' were violated; and how frightened he became when a comfortable pattern—for instance, the order of school buses lined up at the end of the day- -was disturbed. What cured him? It's not clear: perhaps his mother's bulldog determination that he could be rescued, the shock of puberty, some reconnected neurons—or a combination of all three. This book offers hope but no plan for reclaiming other autistic lives. Notable for its window into the thoughts and feelings of an autistic child—and for its gratifyingly happy ending.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-76111-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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
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