A poignant, affecting memoir of growing up orphaned and its injurious impact on adulthood. Cournos (Clinical Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.) unfolds with painful honesty the story of a childhood marked by loss. Young Francine barely knew her father, who died after a brief illness when she was three. Within a few years, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. By the time she was 11, the author had seen the cancer devour her mother while everyone around her seemed to deny the illness. Her younger brother had been placed in foster care earlier, and soon after her mother’s death, she and her sister were turned over to the Jewish Child Care Association by close relatives. This final abandonment is today the most perplexing to the author. “I don—t think any amount of reflection will ever allow me to understand why my relatives were so lacking in any sense of empathy or responsibility,” she writes. At the time, 11-year-old Francine assumed she was to blame; being abandoned once again was surely a just punishment for something terrible that she had done. She could only feel valued at school, where her excellence won recognition and respect. Education and perseverance gained her a doctorate and a career as a practicing psychiatrist. This is not the happy ending, however: Surrounded by respectful colleagues, married to a loving, supportive husband, the mother of a vibrant daughter, the adult Cournos suffers a major clinical depression. It worsens from a panic to a debilitating darkness when she refuses to take medication because —[that] would prove what I feared most all along, I—m damaged and defective.” It took Cournos eight months to recover. Now stabilized by Prozac and no longer fearing impending disaster, she finds peace and productivity. Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly engaging, offering hope and awareness to all who have experienced pivotal losses. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04731-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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