A slim but worthy addition to the literature of terminal illness.
A sassy, brutally frank, and mercifully brief memoir of a British journalist’s 1997 decline and death by breast cancer, supplemented by e-mails and recollections from her family and friends.
At 32, a year after giving birth to twins, London Observer columnist Picardie discovered that a lump on her breast, previously diagnosed as a benign cyst, had become virulently malignant. Within months she learned that the cancer, which defied chemotherapy and less conventional treatments, had spread to her bones, lungs, and brain—and would soon kill her. After some soul-searching, she decided to write a column about her final days that would apply her flair for colloquial confession and shock humor (“you ram a carrot up the arse of the next person who advises you to start drinking homeopathic frogs urine”) to the messy agony of dying young. Expecting to be made thin by nauseating chemotherapy treatments, she was surprised when the steroids she was prescribed made her fat. Lashing out at patronizing acquaintances, clueless physicians, quack nostrums, and New Age gurus (referring to Andrew Weill, she snarls that “books by men with facial hair are not for me”), she finds solace in binge eating and spending lavishly on expensive makeup (“My non-beard book, Shop Yourself Out of Cancer, is coming soon”). So much fire-breathing sarcasm in the five short columns she managed to complete is balanced by confessions of terror, disgust, and lingering sadness (for herself and her children both) in various e-mails she exchanged with a female cancer sufferer and a man diagnosed with AIDS. Additional essays from her sister Justine and husband Matt Seaton portray Picardie as a complicated woman of uncommon brilliance and strength.
A slim but worthy addition to the literature of terminal illness.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6612-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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