An unsparing chronicle of fear and suffering and the hard-won courage that beat it all.
A bestseller in Canada, this graphic account by the survivor of a grizzly-bear attack movingly details her long road to recovery as she describes the disfigurement, emotional trauma, and strains on her marriage caused by the accident.
In the fall of 1983, Trish and husband Trevor set off from their home in Calgary to spend the weekend hiking in a nearby National Park. Trish, a nurse, and Trevor, a medical student, were both in their early 20s and endowed with good looks, close families, and many friends—and the future looked good. All this changed when on the way back Trevor was attacked by a bear, and Trish, convinced he was dead, tried to climb a tree to escape, and in turn was savagely mauled. Her jaw was broken, her left eye and cheek destroyed, and her scalp badly abraded. As she tells how she and Trevor, who was alive and actually in better shape than she was, were rescued by a party of hikers, she recalls how they met and married. She then details the excruciating 17-year recovery she endured, an ordeal that strained but did not destroy the marriage. She battled not only constant pain, but depression that led to hospitalizations and a suicide attempt, until she was finally diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. During those years she underwent numerous, and not always successful, surgeries: an attempt at creating a prosthetic eye and eyelid went horribly wrong when painful infections developed, and the doctor refused her plea to remove the titanium posts placed in her forehead. She also bore four children, one of whom has Down’s Syndrome; lost her father to cancer; lived for a year in New Zealand; and tried to return to work. When Trish finally received appropriate psychiatric treatment, she was able to face down her fears, accept her disfigurement, and savor the fact that she was a survivor.
An unsparing chronicle of fear and suffering and the hard-won courage that beat it all.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42131-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
