An engrossing and wrenching memoir.
A family’s tragedy is revealed in agonizing detail.
Spinney’s moving and painful debut memoir recounts the devastating injury sustained by her son, Miles, a handsome, bright, and adventurous 29-year-old who crashed while snowboarding in Switzerland. Rushing to his side, the author and her family discovered that bleeding and swelling of his brain had compressed his brain stem. He fell into a coma and was hooked up to myriad tubes and a ventilator. Trying to be responsible, Miles had worn a crash helmet: it likely saved his life, but, Spinney came to realize, instant death might have been preferable. After a few weeks, he was weaned from the ventilator and given a tracheostomy; a titanium plate was affixed to the top of his skull. Food, sterile water, and multiple medications flowed into his body through tubes. From the hospital in Innsbruck, where he was treated with exemplary care, he was flown back to London, first to an intensive care unit, then to a leading brain injury hospital, and finally to a long-term care residence. Every move proved wrenching for all. Despite a host of therapies (occupational, physical, speech) and treatments, Miles made hardly any progress, officially diagnosed as MCS: minimally conscious state. In each new medical facility, Spinney found herself forced to advocate aggressively for her son’s needs; when she encountered a doctor who considered Miles’ point of view, she was “flooded with relief.” The author chronicles the next four years, during which she, her husband, Ron, and their other children upended their lives to support Miles, constantly revising their concept of hope. Suffering endless “excruciating pain, humiliation, anger, misery, frustration, loneliness, boredom,” Miles, the family reluctantly decided, would rather be dead. But ending his life was legally impossible under British law, which reserves that option only for individuals in a persistent vegetative state. Ron’s diagnosis with cancer and ensuing physical ordeal offer an additional perspective on the limitations and consequences of medical intervention.
An engrossing and wrenching memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-54-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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