Subjective memoir about film reviewer Haskell's emotions when her Film reviewer husband Andrew Sarris is felled by a near-fatal rare disease and becomes the sickest person ever seen in New York Hospital who lived. Many will admire Haskell's knack for wringing every emotive droplet from a vast thunderhead. One gives up early to her endless diversions or else finds oneself locked into an excruciating reading experience of walleyed pages that seem like nothing so much as reportorial space-filling Never mind that all the stuffing—the whole emotional webbing of her life, of her parental ties, her ties to her husband's family, her personal friendships (nobody seems left out), workplace friends, friends in the hospital—proves magnetized to her "love" theme. One cries GET ON WITH IT! But no—it's surrender to what she herself terms "neurotic" and sounds like free association, much of it in the jargon of a lapsed 70's feminist. In the end she admits that she's leaving Andy's version of his illness to himself—it's his material. And she is accustomed not only to living in her adored husband's shadow, but also in having his fabulous film-brain and knockout intuitive powers at her disposal. But here she's on her own, and recapturing square-handed signals of despair. Andy's illness is undiagnosable. Operation follows operation. A colostomy, ugh! Infections create big new illnesses. He's dying He's paranoid—for months! She can't connect with him. What's worse, her mother, who has never connected with Andy, can't connect with her. And Andy's mother is a mess, seemingly taking on his illness and suddenly coming down with something like Alzheimer's disease. The bills are colossal. For the first time in her childless marriage, Molly attempts to sort out the household finances and is staggered. Close friends die by the handful. And WHAT'S WRONG WITH ANDY? He's such a multilayered mystery, with so many bugs and breakdowns, that by the time he miraculously recovers the final diagnosis is Kafkaesque makeshift. Many strong clinical passages will carry this with most readers, who may well warm to the love theme too and find Haskell's method daring.
Pub Date: April 19, 1990
ISBN: 0595140408
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
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
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