A bittersweet mingling of previous life-changing events and present-moment illness by a skillful author.
The author’s journey “from the emotional storms…of widowhood to the astonishment of finding new love in my senior years, and on to the sudden cardiac crisis…that forced me, finally, to confront a past that I had never put wholly to rest.”
After Lear's (Where Did I Leave My Glasses?: The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss, 2008, etc.) first husband died from a series of heart attacks, she detailed her struggle in her first book, the acclaimed Heartsounds (1980). What she didn't anticipate was that almost 30 years later, she would also experience a heart attack and wind up in the exact same hospital, in the same cardiac unit, with the same doctor, no less, as her husband. Lear provides rich, poignant details of her own attack, as well as her travels through the medical establishment from one test to another. The ghosts of those moments spent with her first husband in those same hospital hallways continually haunted her, and Lear leaned heavily on the past to help her cope with the often bewildering moments of the present. Her second husband was always by her side to assist in any way he could, and a host of nurses and doctors also helped out, attempting to understand why she had the attack and then contracted a serious staph infection, which caused her leg to become unbearably painful and unusable. However, as any patient knows, there is only so much a spouse, doctor or nurse can do, as sickness of any kind is a solitary journey. Lear maneuvers through the weeks she spent in the hospital with the adroitness of someone who's been down this road before.
A bittersweet mingling of previous life-changing events and present-moment illness by a skillful author.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4615-5
Page Count: 127
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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