A tough opening slog gives way to a compelling story.
Sobering account of a British fashion writer’s struggles with alcoholism and clinical depression.
The daughter of an oil-industry executive whose work took him to posts throughout the world, Brampton (Love, Always, 2000, etc.) spent much of her childhood in the Middle East, South America and Africa. In a debut memoir weakened in early chapters by a deluge of dull scientific data on depression, the author asserts that her peripatetic upbringing in an emotionless family left her vulnerable to mental illness and dependency on alcohol. Unable to shake her increasingly dark moods and daily consumption of at least two bottles of wine, Brampton eventually sought professional help. She writes with arch and revealing wit about her on-again-off-again odyssey with antidepressants, detox centers, in-patient psychiatric facilities, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and addiction therapy sessions (during which participants bandied “Group of Drunks” as an acronym for God). Brampton is especially skilled at detailing the self-delusion, denial and furtive uncontrolled drinking that, she notes, compound the real and imagined pain of those in the grips of alcoholism and despair. She devotes a chilling chapter to her ultimately ill-fated decision to withdraw cold turkey from prescription drugs that had kept her, despite complications, on a relatively even keel. Writing with stoic, self-mocking charm, she attributes her failed suicide attempts to unreliable Internet chatter on the best methods to achieve a fatal overdose. Still, Brampton notes that her triumphs as an acclaimed journalist helped her to maintain a nurturing, upbeat relationship with her teenage daughter through it all. In closing passages, the author writes of a hard-won recovery program that includes yoga, transcendental meditation, gardening, walking, B vitamins and abstinence from booze. She also married a man she’d distanced during the full-throttle phase of her disease.
A tough opening slog gives way to a compelling story.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06678-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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