The main question is whether Noble was better served in the mental health system, or outside of it, and the answers she...
Noble’s story of living with dissociative identity disorder and of being misdiagnosed, misunderstood and adrift in society.
The author’s powerful memoir begins right from the dedication: "This book is dedicated to our much-loved daughter Aimee, the sunshine of my life, and our wonderful therapist for her footsteps in the sand." Noble isn't referring to a husband or partner with "our"—she's referring to herself. More specifically, herselves: Noble has more than 20 identified personalities, 14 of which are individually renowned artists with their own distinct styles and strengths. Throughout the book, the author switches between “our” and “my,” heightening the connection of readers to the story. Growing up, her parents struggled with their own problems, as individuals and as a couple, which added to Noble's struggle with being overlooked while she found ways to compensate for the growing discord in her head. As the difficulties of adolescence compounded her challenges, the compensations became inadequate and she found herself—the self she identified as her primary personality at the time—awaking in the hospital more frequently. But little came of the hospitalizations. As Noble began to tentatively form connections with others, she found the ground under her feet shifting constantly: Who had she met? With whom did she do this activity, or that one? Which personality was responsible for the teenage misbehaviors? These and other similar questions form the core of the narrative.
The main question is whether Noble was better served in the mental health system, or outside of it, and the answers she reaches trying to grow into adulthood and motherhood are at once jarring and deeply moving.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61374-470-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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