A heartfelt memoir of devotion and determination.
The story of a family’s triumph after a medical catastrophe.
In her moving nonfiction debut, Crigler recounts her brother Jason’s arduous recovery from a burst blood vessel in his brain, a recovery that involved his wife, parents and, most intimately, the author herself. Punctuated by brief diary entries and recollections of anxious dreams, Crigler chronicles Jason’s day-by-day challenges as he suffered from the consequences of the bleed—loss of the ability to move and speak—and ensuing complications: meningitis, seizures, coma and a host of infections. After three months of repeated setbacks, Jason seemed imprisoned in his body: “[a]drift on a lifeboat in the most remote sea.” As they monitored his care, the family was frustrated by confusing and mixed messages about his prognosis for recovery. They were also frustrated by their health insurance, which “questioned every treatment and refused many of them” with the goal “to pay as little money as possible.” Depending on what they hoped would be humane and competent care, the family came to the “harsh realization that Jason’s care was driven not by what would help him but by cost.” Cowed, at first, by his physicians, the family defied their advice and brought Jason to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, renowned for treating brain injury. There, he made enough progress to be discharged. Crigler and Jason shared an apartment for several months while he worked with physical therapists and on his own to recapture basic skills. With the author as round-the-clock caregiver, other family members pitched in. Exhaustion and stress gave way, at times, to emotional tensions. More than a year later, Jason gained enough independence to share the apartment with his wife and infant daughter; after several more years, which included eye and mouth surgery, proton beam radiation to his brain and much exercise, he was able to resume his career as a musician.
A heartfelt memoir of devotion and determination.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5414-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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