A painful but wonderfully written memoir that should create greater awareness of a bizarre disorder; that so many medical...
Horrific first-person account of child abuse by a survivor with keen self-awareness, a sharp eye for detail, and an original, poetic voice.
In Munchausen by Proxy (MBP), a caretaker, usually the mother, falsifies or induces physical and/or mental illness in a dependent person, usually a child, to gain sympathy from others and control over the dependent. Gregory’s mother did this to her for many years, dragging her to doctor after doctor, coaching her to act sick, punishing her harshly if she didn’t do it convincingly enough, demanding endless treatments, tests, and invasive procedures, including surgery. At first the illnesses were relatively minor—nausea, headaches, allergies—but as her mother’s collection of home medical books provided information about more symptoms and tests, they escalated. When heart catheterization failed to reveal the abnormalities the mother insisted were there, she demanded that open-heart surgery be performed on her daughter. It was not, but nose surgery later was. At home, Gregory suffered other forms of child abuse, including beatings and semi-starvation. That she survived this miserable childhood seems remarkable, for as Marc Feldman (Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology/Univ. of Alabama) notes in his foreword, many victims of MBP do not. Amazingly, Gregory never stopped loving her manipulative mother and ineffectual but sometimes brutal father. When she learned about MBP in a college psychology course and grasped what had happened to her, she began gathering her childhood medical records, some of which she has inserted into relevant passages here. Her attempts as an adult to reconnect with her parents were at best bitterly disappointing and deeply disturbing in the case of her mother, who had begun MBP behaviors with an 11-year-old girl in her care.
A painful but wonderfully written memoir that should create greater awareness of a bizarre disorder; that so many medical professionals and social workers were oblivious to what was really going on in the Gregory household attests to the need. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80307-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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 2026 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.
