This slim volume chronicles Reynolds Price's four years with ``the eel,'' his name for the ten-inch long tumor that was found enmeshed in his spinal chord during his 51st year. With little fanfare or self-pity, the acclaimed author (Blue Calhoun, 1992; Kate Vaiden, 1986; etc.) and long-time teacher at Duke University takes the reader through each battle, medical and personal, from the ordeal of his initial and incomplete surgery to the debilitating effects of the ensuing radiation therapy, which left him paraplegic. He lavishes praise on nurses, therapists, and loyal friends along the way, while condemning unthinking doctors for their ignorance of the human element in practicing medicine. And he thanks the worthy; the book is dedicated, in part, to his surgeon. A particularly moving segment in its honesty and courage (although Price might very well deny the latter) is his struggle through rehab, ``a marooned island of damaged men and women intent on bringing ourselves to a state of repair that would let us visit the mainland again.'' Throughout, Price mixes facts from his calendar—mostly records of his pain level and physical descent- -with poems from his daybook. These verses allow the reader to touch the emotional river coursing beneath the narrative that the author works so hard to keep objective. Ultimately, there is something comforting about this book and, yes, inspiring. The eel is removed and Price learns to negotiate his pain. He returns to writing and teaching with a greater intensity than ever before. This is the story of a man who watches his first self die, and in place of it, a new self created; a story of resurrection, of transformation; a story of hope.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-689-12197-0
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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