Honest and gut-wrenching.
A son’s memoir about caring for his ill mother during the last year of her life.
Manning (editor: Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player of All Time, 2010, etc.) unsparingly recounts what happened when his mother, Susan, was hospitalized with cardiac issues complicated by lung cancer and gastroparesis (stomach paralysis). Susan was a single parent and nurse whose kindness, courage and determination inspired everyone who knew her. Heart problems ran in her family, but the heart attack she suffered at 58 caught everyone, including her son, off guard. The book centers on Susan’s life at the three Cleveland medical facilities that became her home for one year. As her health declined, Manning became the parent looking after a mother rendered vulnerable and helpless by her condition. With admirable objectivity and restraint, the author writes about the people, procedures, machines and medications that worked—sometimes at cross purposes—to keep Susan alive. The book is not just a portrait of a woman with a ferocious will to live, but of the American health-care system and how it treats illness and death. Manning punctuates the main narrative with stories about his family, his own life as a writer and caterer in New York and the Cleveland sports teams—the Cavaliers, Indians and Browns—that helped him “differentiate one day from the next.” Moments of levity are few, however, and the story moves unrelentingly toward its inevitable—but for Susan, merciful—conclusion. The intimate details about his mother’s physical struggles and the emotional stresses and strains he and his family suffered occasionally make the book read like a private journal. Paraphrasing a line from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Manning admits that he wrote the story “more to get it out my head than for posterity” and as a way “to acknowledge how messy this shit gets.” Nonetheless, the author’s candor and genuine emotion shine through.
Honest and gut-wrenching.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46324-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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