A tender evocation of fear, hope, and love.
A mother recounts a year in her family’s life as they confront their newborn’s devastating diagnosis.
In 2000, Dutch novelists de Jong’s third child was born with a strange bump on her back. A skin biopsy revealed that the baby had congenital myeloid leukemia, an exceedingly rare disease for which there was no standard treatment protocol. Her sympathetic pediatric oncologist could offer only chemotherapy but cautioned that it was so harsh that it might cause blindness, infertility, or death. Stunned, de Jong and her husband, Robbert, decided to forgo that option. The author quietly conveys the couple’s sense of desperation as they returned to their home in a seedy section of Amsterdam to watch and wait. She took a leave from her job to care for her infant and two young sons, determined to nourish, protect, and love the baby for whatever time she had left. At the hospital for her daughter’s bone-marrow biopsy and at weekly visits to the oncologist, de Jong observed the terrifying world of childhood cancer: pale, skinny children weakened by chemotherapy, hollow-eyed parents frustrated by their powerlessness. She felt as if she had entered a “portal of death.” At home, they were supported by a motley assortment of neighbors: a friendly young prostitute working out of a brothel across the street; an eccentric man living with his aging mother; another man who grew sicker each day. All offered sympathy and prayers. In contrast, people she hardly knew, impelled by “morbid curiosity disguised as empathy,” intruded with shocking, sometimes bizarre, remarks. After one disturbing visit, de Jong dug “a deep moat around our house” and “pulled up the drawbridge.” Since watching and waiting do not in themselves yield a lively narrative, de Jong shares details of family outings, childhood memories, and surreal dreams. In one, she is running home with her children on streets made of quicksand. Happily, readers know from the start that this story ends well.
A tender evocation of fear, hope, and love.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60915-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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