Freelance sportswriter and motivational speaker Garlett (What Were They Thinking?: The Brainless Blunders that Changed Sports History, 2009, etc.) writes with humor and brutal honesty about his 17-year battle to defeat cancer.
In 1989, Garlett was expecting his senior year in high school to be a ball; when he noticed two lumps in his neck, he wasn't unduly alarmed. A biopsy revealed Hodgkin's lymphoma, but the doctor reassured him that it could be cured. He finished the school year and went on to college, functioning despite the debilitating effects of radiation treatment, but his first year in college was a disaster. He spent his time partying and barely squeaked by academically. Then the Hodgkin's returned and this time he faced six cycles of disabling chemotherapy. After another remission, he buckled down in college and established a career as a sportswriter after graduation. His remission lasted only until 1995; this time, his odds of surviving were reduced to 40 percent. His treatment was so severe that he was on the point of death several times and required a bone-marrow transplant. After finally defeating the Hodgkin’s, two years later he faced leukemia and three more years of treatment. Describing his experiences with wry humor, he chronicles how he managed to keep working, met and married his wife and worked to rebuild his strength. Not content to define himself with just being a survivor, he welcomed new challenges. After recovering from a heart transplant (necessitated by the effects of chemotherapy), he competed in the grueling Ironman Triathlon. A compassionate celebration of the human spirit that doesn't gloss over tough realities.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61374-005-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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