An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.
How the author and his family overcame the loss of a child.
When his 8-year-old son Owen accidentally drowned on a family rafting trip, Gerson (French Studies/New York Univ.), his wife, Alison, and remaining son, Julian, were as shocked as they were grief-stricken. Owen’s death, writes the author, was “at once a ripple in the flow of everyday life and a disruption of the entire universe.” Desperate to understand his loss, Gerson went deep inside himself and began to write while Alison externalized her grief through exercise. As he imagined Owen growing up and old, the author obsessively revisited the day of Owen’s death and the hours that preceded it, carefully skirting around the actual incident itself. The strain of his son’s death eventually caused Gerson to develop a rash and then other symptoms of physical breakdown, including bowel irritation, a hernia, prostatitis, and tinnitus. The loss affected Gerson’s relationship to Alison as well as the relationships each had to their respective parents. Needing comfort, it was as though they had “bec[o]me children again.” Yet it also brought Gerson closer to his own history as the son of an American-born Jewish man whose own family escaped the Holocaust. A trip to Belarus with his father, Berl, and son made Gerson realize that “those who had failed to save loved ones did not necessarily live in shame or guilt.” This epiphany helped him to not only look directly at Owen’s death, but also see that he was not to blame for it. Berl’s own “good death” not long afterward released Gerson from his past, which allowed him to share the words he had penned about Owen with Alison and relive the civil lawsuit that followed the tragedy. Keenly observed and deeply felt, this book is not only a powerful reflection on grief and loss, but also an intimately textured history of fathers and sons.
An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90669-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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