Inspiring and courageous.
In fulfilling the promise made in his third collection of poetry (My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, 2008, etc.), Guest produces a memoir chronicling the life-altering accident that robbed him of an active childhood.
When the author was 12, he lost control of a bicycle and flipped over the handlebars, breaking both arms and shattering two neck vertebrae. His hospital experience, related in surreal, fever-dream tones, became a harsh amalgam of “catastrophe and convalescence.” Guest was told he had only a slim chance of ever walking again and should resign himself to living indefinitely as a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic. Nausea, indigestion and infections mattered little compared to the full-body paralysis that sent him to a rehabilitation facility in Atlanta, where he was fitted into a fiberglass vest and a steel traction “halo” for nine weeks, an alternative therapy that proved ineffective. Befriending 17-year-old Josh and others boosted his self-esteem much more than the “libidinal hazing” of awkward sex-instruction videos that were showcased nightly within the facility. Eventually, nerves healed and partial sensation returned to his extremities, but not before an excruciating neck surgery. Finally returning home, he faced rides on the “short bus,” a string of eccentric assistants and the excitement and challenge of the female sex. Young adulthood was a mixed bag. The author was callously mugged in an elevator yet found true emotional release in crafting volumes of poetry, teaching and blissful physical intimacy. Never mawkish or grim, Guest’s lyrical narrative ability tempers the heft of his experience, but the tender age at which he endured this grueling ordeal resonates on every page.
Inspiring and courageous.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-168517-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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
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