A story rich in emotional description but hastily recounted at times.
A cancer survivor recalls her treatment, recovery, and life before her diagnosis in her debut memoir.
In the “uncommonly hot” summer of 1969, Reaves relocated to San Francisco after two years at Pomona College in Claremont, California. The opening chapter describes her going about her summer job answering calls at the Greyhound bus company and meeting an alluring streetcar driver named David. The memoir then fast-forwards to 2008, when Reaves was diagnosed with tongue cancer. The author sets about recounting her earlier years in which she lived in a six-bedroom commune started by David, whom she later married before they relocated to the British Virgin Islands to work as teachers. Chapters that chronicle the various stages of her cancer treatments are interspersed with those that tell of her attending law school, coming out, and meeting her life partner, Tanya. In 1986, Reaves gave birth to their son, Cooper, and afterward had chemotherapy for lymphoma. Her memoir is about how she learned to live her life regardless of her challenges, and she is skilled in conveying complex emotions. Recalling her drug regimen for tongue cancer, she writes: “I imagine my death, my memorial service, life in my household without me. Tears flow randomly, without warning. At times, I’m at peace, gazing out the window at brilliant blue skies and leafless trees, feeling the golden light pouring over my bed where I doze.” Such passages evoke an overwhelming sense of pathos. Other aspects of Reaves’ richly textured life are hurriedly described. In depicting the Virgin Islands, the author attempts to set the scene in the space of a sentence that doesn’t transport the reader: “St. Thomas teems with life: kids yelling, dogs barking, horns tooting, music blasting, parents yelling, mosquitoes buzzing, mice skittering, cockroaches crunching, lizards slithering, everyone laughing, laughing, laughing.” The central focus of the memoir, Reaves’ battle against cancer, is reflective and hopeful but not a step-by-step guide to coping. The emphasis is on the author’s courageous journey, which is in itself empowering.
A story rich in emotional description but hastily recounted at times.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-876-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
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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