Speaking to both animal welfare and the well-being of wounded warriors, Montalván’s memoir is a testimonial to the “quest...
Affecting memoir by wounded veteran and PTSD–treatment advocate Montalván (Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, 2011), well known for his public appearances with his service dog, Tuesday.
“I’ve never sat down and calculated the thousands and thousands of miles we’ve traveled together, but I do know this much: The longest journey of all was the one inside my head.” So writes Purple Heart recipient Montalván, whose body was shattered in combat in Iraq and who suffered the well-documented travails of stress upon his return. In the company of Tuesday, an affable golden retriever with dancing eyebrows, the author worked his way out of the solitude of an apartment and began to advocate for veterans’ rights across the country. Montalván’s tone ranges from the affectionate to the aggrieved, just as his narrative ranges from an inspirational encounter with a withdrawn Tuskegee Airman to some difficult passages describing what it feels like to be blown up, to lose a limb—and, moreover, to be sculpted surgically to accommodate a prosthetic leg: “My leg—or where my leg had been that morning—felt weird and slightly indescribable. But it didn’t hurt anymore, and I can’t tell you what a relief that absence of pain felt like to me.” It makes a sad denouement to know that the author, who writes hopefully of a continued life of advocacy and travel with Tuesday, committed suicide after finishing the book. His co-author offers the similarly hopeful thought that “Luis is waiting in a meadow somewhere for his beloved Tuesday,” but the event should reinforce Montalván’s insistence that American combat veterans need more and better support from the government that sent them in harm’s way.
Speaking to both animal welfare and the well-being of wounded warriors, Montalván’s memoir is a testimonial to the “quest for wholeness” and the healing power of companionship.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31441-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
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