Inspirational proof that there’s nothing like a death scare to put life into perspective.
A health crisis provides an accomplished cartoonist with the richest material of her career.
Though there’s never an ideal time for someone to learn she has cancer, Marchetto (Just Who the Hell Is She, Anyway?, not reviewed) found it particularly ironic that the worst news she’d ever received came during the best stretch of adult life she’d ever enjoyed. She’d started selling cartoons to the New Yorker and was a fixture in other New York magazines as well. She had fabulous friends, fabulous shoes and an overstuffed apartment she could afford. Best of all, in her early 40s and never married, she had fallen madly in love with a celebrity restaurateur who somehow preferred her to all the leggy models who patronized Da Silvano’s and fawned all over him. Then she discovered the lump, learned she had breast cancer and realized that she had let her health insurance lapse. From such potentially depressing material, the author has drawn a triumphant, biting, self-deprecating, journalistically detailed and frequently hilarious account of true love conquering all. In flashbacks to the years before her diagnosis, Marchetto details the conspicuous consumption and competitive cattiness of life in New York magazine circles, before 9/11 put such frivolities on hold. A magazine assignment led her to Silvano’s restaurant, and her romance with the owner changed her life. But would Silvano go through with the marriage once he learned of the cancer? Would Marchetto be able to receive the best medical treatment without insurance? Would the side effects of all those biopsies and treatments allow her to continue the drawing that constituted her livelihood? Somehow, the graphic artist has taken the tone of Sex and the City into the cancer ward, with a happy ending that makes her memoir seem all the more life-affirming.
Inspirational proof that there’s nothing like a death scare to put life into perspective.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26357-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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