The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at...
A touching debut memoir about a middle-aged woman charged with caring for both her aging father and her two growing children.
Sullivan’s story begins at a time when she was in a particularly tough spot: her mother had died, her father had suffered a stroke, and her husband had filed for divorce. Rather than wallow in grief or self-pity, the author decided to do something that just felt good, so she moved from Indiana to sunny Anna Maria Island, Florida, where her parents had owned a beach cottage for decades. The idea seemed like an idyllic escape and a flawless plan—except for the fact that her father, who needed constant care, wanted to go with her, and her Indiana-based siblings wouldn’t hear of it. But Sullivan decided to go anyway, packing up her kids and her dad and heading to the Gulf of Mexico. The memoir tracks her subsequent adventures in Florida, where she lived through hurricanes, floods, and plenty of long-distance spats with siblings. It also chronicles the slow decline of her father, who later suffered from dementia and cancer. Overall, Sullivan’s book is a tender tribute to a man she regarded as a kind father and beloved grandparent. It also provides a moving picture of the ways that the family made their ailing patriarch’s final years adventurous and fun, such as by taking a family vacation to Ireland. The author deftly examines the drama of complicated family dynamics and provides an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a member of the so-called “sandwich generation,” caring for both children and parents. One of the strongest aspects of Sullivan’s memoir is the way she beautifully describes caring for a parent with dementia: “His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all….[T]he dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could.”
The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at once.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940442-12-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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