A luminous story of love, heartbreak and hard-won wisdom.
In this harrowing memoir, a mother endures the unendurable when her son is stricken with a devastating illness.
When her 13-year-old son Jeremy nonchalantly collapses with a ruptured vein in his brain, the author’s safe, carefully tended life with her husband and three children comes crashing down. Jeremy lies in a coma in the hospital, fighting for his life against a barrage of dire complications, his right side paralyzed while his left side unconsciously flails about, trying to pull the painful drainage tubes from his head. Fiala cares for him around the clock, soothing his convulsions, willing him to breathe, but beneath her exterior of calm efficiency she is “a small, frightened animal in a dark cage, keening with grief.” After the immediate crisis wanes, the family faces a lengthy, gray struggle to adapt to Jeremy’s handicaps—to teach him to sit up, to dress, even to chew and swallow—while facing an agonizing choice between the probability of a subsequent rupture and a dangerous, experimental procedure that might resolve the threat for good. Fiala’s limpid, sharp-eyed prose is unflinching in its depiction of the ordeal. She shows us the ravages inflicted on Jeremy by his illness and by grueling medical procedures, the callousness and occasional negligence of an overstretched health-care system and her own exhausted coldness toward the other suffering children in Jeremy’s ward. But she also discovers inspiration, hope and renewal in the experience—in Jeremy’s dogged courage and good cheer in confronting his disabilities, in acts of compassion by friends and strangers, in the testing and reaffirmation of her faith. (A spontaneous Internet support group called the Jeremy Network sprang up and held several prayer vigils that preceded near-miraculous improvements in Jeremy’s condition.) Fiala’s unsparing yet lyrical account of lives shattered and rebuilt despite daunting constraints teaches us how much we can lose without losing what matters.
A luminous story of love, heartbreak and hard-won wisdom.Pub Date: April 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-933880-19-8
Page Count: 318
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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