A remarkable look at the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems.
Journalist Fischer embraces her anguished past to champion underdogs both human and canine.
The title is misleading: The author did rescue several dogs belonging to an abusive neighbor, but that’s not the main focus of her debut memoir. In 1955, the Fischer family moved from the Bay Area to a suburban house with a pool in sunny San Fernando Valley. On the surface, everything seemed idyllic, until Mary’s maternal grandmother, diagnosed with stomach cancer, moved in with the family. When Mary’s mother succumbed to grief after Nanna’s death, her husband committed her to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. She would remain there, receiving multiple electroshock treatments, for the next decade. Her daughters would see her only twice during that time. Within months, their father sent Mary and her older sister, Kate, to the Ramona Convent boarding school, where they, too, would spend nearly a decade. Both girls suffered greatly from the stigma of having a “crazy” mother and from their removal from home. Later, they were allowed to live with their father while attending an all-girls Catholic high school. Out of these dysfunctional beginnings grew the author’s interest in righting wrongs. After floundering for a few years, she wrote a few stories for the local paper and moved to New York City to work as a freelancer. Four years later, she returned to Los Angeles for her big break. It was 1984, and the McMartin preschool molestation story had just made headlines. The McMartins were mostly vilified in the press, but Fischer was one of the very few journalists who questioned the bizarre accusations. After researching the story for months, she published her doubts in Los Angeles magazine. The thoughtful piece generated national attention and helped turn public perception in favor of the McMartins, who were finally—after years—acquitted. But during this time of professional blossoming, both of Mary’s parents died, and she completely severed ties with her sister.
A remarkable look at the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-20987-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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