Flawed, but in patches a vivid depiction of an unorthodox school and its controversial director.
A New York City investment banker recounts his long haul through a childhood and adolescence of emotional troubles.
By the time he was eight, Eliot remembers, he saw dangers everywhere. In response, he became verbally vicious, full of rage and sadness, arrogance and grandiosity. In profound disequilibrium, he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Here, recounting his 13 years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School in Chicago, he tries to crawl back into the skin of the boy who never felt comfortable in that skin. Bettelheim would have approved, for it was his conviction that to help a disturbed child, you first had to see the world as the child did. But Eliot is a different creature now, and it is difficult for him to coax his strange younger self onto the page, despite reference to notes taken by his counselors. However, he is eloquent in describing the Orthogenic School’s routines and in weaving his progress through them, from the battling child who established a relationship with another person for the first time, to the golden middle years when he started to catch glimpses of his behavior in a context other than his own, to the desire to be free of observation and others’ control. Also sharp is Eliot’s portrait of Bettelheim, contradictions and brilliance and all. A genius at “digging out the underlying truth about an issue,” the psychologist had less attractive traits, including a weakness for humiliating students and an inability to adequately contend with teenage sexual issues. Yet he created an environment that could foster and re-create personality, at least for some. Eliot knows that leaving the school at age 21 to attend Yale was not a miracle or a matter of luck, but the result of counselors who knew he had “a streak of sanity somewhere” and helped him find, mine, and refine it.
Flawed, but in patches a vivid depiction of an unorthodox school and its controversial director.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30749-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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