The subject matter makes the book occasionally painful to read, but it is informative about the difficult world of children...
An inspirational book about eight children who struggled with life-threatening diseases and had their wishes granted by the Make-A-Wish foundation.
In the foreword, Make-A-Wish co-founder Frank Shankwitz tells the story of the first child who inspired the foundation. He suffered from leukemia, and his wish was to become a Highway Patrol motorcycle officer. Shankwitz, who was in the Arizona Highway Patrol at the time, was able to grant his wish with the help of other officers. All of the stories are touching, and the children are memorable and, while similar, display plenty of differences. There is Tatum Null, who describes herself as “sassy” and is obsessed with Disney princesses. Katelyn Atwell, another cancer survivor, became an engagement speaker after raising enough money to grant five wishes. While the Make-A-Wish foundation is often thought of as a relief for children in pain, this shows that it is much more. Sparks demonstrates how having a wish granted—whether it was a vacation, swimming with a dolphin or meeting a significant person—helped with the healing process. Many of the children became stronger as a result of having something to look forward to. As Sharon Atwell, Katelyn’s mother, says, St. Jude healed her daughter physically, while Make-A-Wish healed her spiritually. Not all the stories have happy endings, but the patience and gratitude of the parents for every moment they get to spend with their children is inspiring.
The subject matter makes the book occasionally painful to read, but it is informative about the difficult world of children with life-threatening diseases and their families.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-937856-12-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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