This autobiography of an outspoken HIV-positive Republican and recovering alcoholic is moving when the author steers clear of hackneyed therapeutic language. Fisher (I'll Not Go Quietly, p. 684, etc.), a former Ford administration advance ``man'' and wealthy socialite from a prominent Republican family, has become a public symbol for the lesson that no one is immune to HIV. Fisher's life, despite her privilege, has been anything but easy. Her father abandoned her when she was very young, and much of her life has been spent trying to please Max Fisher, her mother's second husband, an emotionally distant man whose life was politics (he served as a close adviser to presidents Ford and Nixon). Her mother was an alcoholic, as was Mary, who also married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce; after the second divorce, she learned that her ex-husband had infected her with HIV. In her description of her treatment for alcoholism, the well-worn recovery narrative and its attendant jargon get tiresome. However, the excerpts from her speeches are powerful, as are her descriptions of speaking at the 1992 Republican convention and her last day with her dying ex-husband. Her political awakening, however, is only partly rendered: As she becomes part of the AIDS community, she loses friends to the disease, and she gets more critical of conservative responses to AIDS. Yet Fisher is too cautious, no doubt to protect her family and to maintain her political influence. She characterizes some Republican rhetoric on HIV-positive immigrants as ``grisly'' and condemns the Christian right for its moralism. But Fisher writes around other issues, leaving it unclear, for instance, whether she agrees with media accounts that portrayed her famous 1992 speech as the only moment of compassion in an otherwise vicious convention. Despite such gaps and predictable celebrity-in-recovery clichÇs, a strong memoir by a woman who has straddled fascinating contradictions. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81305-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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