A graceful and loving meditation on the inevitability of decline, on the wonder of memory. (17 b&w photos)
British journalist and novelist Grant (Sexing the Millennium, 1994) fashions a stylish, poignant memoir of her mother’s losing battle with an insidious form of dementia.
Grant divides her text into 27 unnumbered sections, beginning with a nightmarish shopping excursion with her mother Rose to buy a dress for a family wedding in 1996, and ending with a lyrical paean to memory (“the Wandering Jew of our physical selves”). A brief Afterword contains an update on her mother’s continuing decline. Rose suffers from MID (Multi-Infarct Dementia), a disease characterized by continual minor strokes that, in her case, have destroyed her short-term memory. Grant chronicles the struggles that she and her sister go through to care for their mother, first in her own apartment and then, finally, in a custodial home. Grant, a wonderful writer, has assembled many touching episodes, many remarkable observations. She remembers being embarrassed and disgusted by her father (who sold supplies to hairdressers); she regrets not paying attention in her youth to the family stories of her elders; she recalls with bemusement her father’s sudden confession of an encounter with a prostitute—and her mother’s placid acceptance (he had given her earrings to soften the news, and jewelry “easily outweighed a sexual infidelity”); she realizes the wisdom of a friend’s comment that “Your mother has become your daughter.” Even in the darkness of her disease, Rose continues to surprise Grant: she follows the O.J. Simpson trial, grieves at the death of Princess Di, and retains her tasteful fashion sense. Most affecting are Grant’s accounts of her wrenching decision to institutionalize her mother. When they finally leave her in a facility, she wonders: “What crime have we perpetrated, bringing her to this terrible place?” Less effective are summaries of discussions about dementia with an administrator of the facility.
A graceful and loving meditation on the inevitability of decline, on the wonder of memory. (17 b&w photos)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-86207-171-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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