An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.
An Irish radio producer tells how she learned to live—and thrive—by the side of a beloved husband diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
When Fitzmaurice first met her filmmaker husband, Simon, she fell in love with a vitality and eloquence that expressed itself in his “dancing hands.” Together they built a bond that was both close and passionate. But during the first decade of living within the happy self-containment of her family “tribe,” Simon suddenly began to limp. Doctors later confirmed that he had MND, a condition that would render him mute and unable to move anything but his eyes. In poetic language, Fitzmaurice recounts the story of how she adjusted to living with a bedridden husband who communicated via an eye-activated computer program. A “merry band” of nurses and caregivers gradually became a permanent feature of her home, as did ventilators and other hospital equipment. Meanwhile, the author oversaw the colorful chaos of living with five small children. Yet at every step of her busy life, she remained all too aware that the only way she could control overwhelming sorrow was to “park it outside of small moments [of peace].” Looking outside the family unit that had once been all she needed to sustain her, Fitzmaurice joined a group of women she came to call “the Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club,” whose members included friends who coped with life-changing challenges that they or their loved ones were facing by diving into the bracing waters of the ocean. The near-constant emotional pain has never left the author, but her achievement, both in life and in this book, is to show the renewing force that her adopted “tribe” and daily swims ultimately became. Though irrevocably changed, Fitzmaurice came to see that the landscape of her life was still every bit as “surprising and beautiful” as it had ever been.
An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-158-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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