With a mission of giving voice to the voiceless, Vallance shares the little-understood experience of surviving a traumatic...
A cathartic chronology of one woman who, rather than being defined by her disability, resolved to live by her own design.
In 1995, while visiting a friend’s farm, Sydney, Australia, native Vallance was thrown from a horse, striking her head against a rock. Feeling no worse for the wear, she wrote it off as a freak accident and returned home with a splitting headache. The next morning, everything seemed fine aside from the mystery of how her toaster ended up in the freezer. However, after a battery of hospital tests, the author was told that she suffered a traumatic brain injury. Going from a well-paying position in government and pursuing a doctorate in public administration to having an IQ of 80 and rapidly worsening memory loss, her new condition threw Vallance into depression and emotional turmoil, with which she has struggled since. Discovering the promise of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change throughout a person’s life, she was determined to finish her doctorate. Then she met Laura, a charming extrovert who became her first long-term lesbian partner and primary source of encouragement. In addition to introducing her many dog and cat companions, the author thoroughly explores the “lifetime of resentment” shared with her mother and pores over the dynamics of her other relationships. After winning a fellowship at Harvard, Vallance’s career pursuits carried her across continents, with stints in Singapore and Hong Kong, and then back to Australia, where she eventually met Louise, whom she eventually married. While certain sections of the narrative stray into a diarist’s minutiae, the book is powerful in its depiction of the author’s will to rise above the limitations of her disability rather than succumb to the obstacles and fears that encompass it.
With a mission of giving voice to the voiceless, Vallance shares the little-understood experience of surviving a traumatic brain injury.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4302-1
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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