Beamon’s first memoir (I Didn't Work This Hard Just to Get Married, 2009) tells of how multiple specialists struggled to diagnose her many ailments.
The author began her battle with chronic illness in her mid-20s, just as she started a new high-pressure job as a television journalist in New York City. Early on, her symptoms descended upon her with vigor, including abdominal and joint pain, debilitating fatigue and fevers. She collapsed at work, at home and even on her first overnight stay with a man who became her longtime boyfriend. Soon, her life revolved around exam rooms, lab tests and medical forms. Beamon hid her condition at work despite growing weaker as years passed. Eventually, after both her parents had health scares of their own, Beamon became despondent about ever feeling well again. Her desperation, frustration and, later, anger at being subjected to multiple hospital visits, invasive exams, and increasingly befuddled experts led her to search for a Sherlock of rare illnesses—her own “Dr. House,” as in the former Fox television drama House, M.D. Using Google, Beamon found her doctor-savior in an autoimmune disorder specialist named Dr. Reed; once the physician gave her condition a name (or, rather, a collection of initials followed by a numeral: IgG4-related systemic disease), Beamon found peace of mind at last. Much of the book follows her numbing routine of doctors’ appointments, which becomes less distressing and more mundane as the book goes on. At first, her confusion and anger at each inconclusive test result seem overwrought, but later, her voice turns jaded, reflecting the toll that the anxiety had taken on her mind and body. Beamon includes moments when her precarious health is in check, including intimate rendezvous with men in her life. At times, she alternates naughty sex acts with graphic medical incidents, and this variety is engaging—even shocking. However, it also makes the book’s plot seem uneven. Overall, the author’s vacillating health status drives much of the action, and at times, her pessimistic inner monologue can feel draining, yet she rarely succumbs to self-pity.
A saga of dealing with a chronic illness that shows how health intertwines with work, love and life.
Pub Date: July 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500436674
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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