A poetic tale of a personal medical crisis.
Memoirist, essayist and novelist Gallagher (The Sacred Meal, 2009, etc.) explores the series of events set into motion by the startling diagnosis that she suffered from a condition causing blindness.
Now in her 60s, the author has written extensively about her faith, including her attraction to Episcopal liturgy and, for a time, to the church's priesthood and the fundamental questions about the religion and its administration. Gallagher opens by explaining that her initial interest in Christianity, as an adult, stemmed from a need to fit her life into a "larger story." In the same chapter, the Californian describes how a 2009 routine doctor's visit, which she almost skipped, resulted in the discovery that her right optic nerve was dangerously inflamed and that the condition (called optic neuritis) could destroy her vision. "I dropped out of the world I lived in," she confesses. "It was like falling into Oz." What ensued was a slew of consultations with one specialist after another, during which the author received conflicting advice that included the suggestion to have her eye removed. She was eventually referred to Minnesota's Mayo Clinic. Groggy from prescribed steroids and anxious about the strain that this ordeal placed on her marriage, Gallagher began a deeply introspective journey that led to, among other shifts, a foundational change in her faith and religious outlook. In her book, the author navigates the complex American health care system, the fear and mystery surrounding her search for medical answers and healing, and her renewed appreciation for the necessity of vision: to read, to write and to view the world.
A poetic tale of a personal medical crisis.Pub Date: May 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-59298-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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