An inspiring life story of special interest to those suffering from depression, a “cancer of the soul.”
A former U.S. senator recounts his recovery from the scars of war, politics and depression.
Following the attacks of 9/11, the onset of the Iraq war and the loss of his senate seat in 2002, Cleland (Going for the Max!, 2000, etc.), “awash in all the old sensations of war,” descended into a two-and-a-half-year depression. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, as events conspired to nearly replicate the effect of his combat experience in Vietnam, where an exploding grenade left him a triple amputee. The son of a Navy veteran, a star at his small Georgia high school and a graduate of Stetson University, whose semester in Washington program cemented his interest in government and politics, Cleland managed to put together an outstanding public-service career after his return from war. He was the youngest chief and first Vietnam veteran to head the Veterans Administration and became a U.S. senator in 1996—the author acknowledges that holding these positions gave him confidence and purpose, a way to cope with life after Vietnam. The loss of public office and a new war—one his senate vote, much to his regret, helped authorize—plunged him back into the darkness of loss: “lost legs, lost arm, lost youth, lost innocence, lost war.” Cleland’s at his best discussing his early life, and he offers moving discussions of his combat and his excruciating rehabilitation and fight against his anxiety disorder. When it comes to politics, however, he’s far less convincing, too loosely expanding his theme of courage to political acts—members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps after 9/11, Vermont Sen. Jeffords’s party switch from Republican to independent—that hardly match the valor required of grievously wounded vets like Cleland himself.
An inspiring life story of special interest to those suffering from depression, a “cancer of the soul.”Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2605-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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