A short but powerful amalgam of journalistic rigor and emotional sensitivity.
In this biography, a woman lives a remarkably independent, productive, and loving life despite a grim medical diagnosis as an infant.
Jonathan Schlesinger and Angelia Edmonton met in 1951 Atlanta, fell deeply in love, and got married. They moved to Philadelphia, where their first child, Joanna, was born in 1954, a month prematurely, weighing in at a mere five pounds. Her parents noticed that one of her eyes sometimes moved in an unusual way, so they shared their concerns with a doctor, who told them that Joanna suffered from irreversible brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. As a result, she experienced seizures and would need to take medication to control them. However, the drug put her in a fuguelike state, and she moved through life as if it was a slow-motion dream. When she turned 5, her parents decided that she needed a level of care that they were ill-prepared to provide, so they brought her to a home outside Philadelphia for mentally impaired children, run by the Sisters’ Order of Saint Mary’s of Providence. She lived there for the next three years, and after she stopped her regimen of medication, she began to live a life that approached normalcy. Then she was moved to the GlenEagles Institute, where her improvement continued to defy expectations. She was athletically active and eventually became a Girl Scout. Finally, she became one of six people chosen to participate in a special university-led program designed to prepare them for the workforce, and she specifically trained to work as a dental assistant. She demonstrated impressive competence and responsibility, forged meaningful relationships, and led a strikingly independent life. Author Slaughter conducted years of meticulous research on Joanna and her family members, including interviews, and his thoroughness shows; in fewer than 100 pages, he paints a full, vivid picture of Joanna’s journey. The story particularly comes alive when he focuses on the nonmedical aspects of her struggle: her openness to love, her fierce sense of self-reliance, and her growing religious faith. The prose is straightforward and unadorned, which allows Joanna’s story to take center stage rather than compete with literary embellishments. This is a poignant, affecting history that will surely inspire readers confronting medical limitations or those who love someone struggling to overcome disability.
A short but powerful amalgam of journalistic rigor and emotional sensitivity.Pub Date: April 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-3458-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2016
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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