Roots of neurosis dug from a darkened, long-ago room.
Prolific magazine writer Stacey, whose praiseworthy debut (Consumed, 1997) examined America’s obsession with food, resurrects from Victorian medical annals the clamor and intrigue once surrounding a celebrated case.
Mollie Fancher, a pretty teenager invalided in a gruesome Brooklyn street accident in 1865, eventually claimed to have gone entirely without eating for more than a dozen years, much to the outrage of contemporary medical poobahs and the delight of her exploitative hometown newspapers. The reader is advised early on that the key to the mystery is how Mollie actually managed to eat on the sly—a question that remains unanswered. Still, other mysteries accrue thick and fast as Stacey shifts perspective and Mollie becomes a metaphor for feminine hysteria and all it comprised in the Victorian era. She was, after all, perhaps the first tabloid anorexic, not to mention any shrink’s potential life’s work with her claims of second sight (while professing total blindness), clairvoyance, and presentation of multiple personalities—not to mention the nine years she said had been erased from her memory. The author has diligently done her homework on all aspects of the case and is not about to jeopardize her investment by understating any of them: readers, who may feel they have bitten off more than they want to chew, must wait for a number of pithy digressions before Mollie’s case gets wrapped up. For example, St. Catherine of Siena’s well-documented (and ultimately fatal) fasts in search of God trigger an analysis of 14th-century female behavior leading to the devilishly provocative conclusion that the Medieval Church may have anointed a string of anorexics as saints. Contemporary personalities are introduced with what often seem dossiers too full relative to their peripheral impact, but, in the end, the zeitgeist has been fully illuminated while Mollie’s secret motives provide grist for psychiatric speculation.
Roots of neurosis dug from a darkened, long-ago room.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58542-135-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
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