A masterful coming-out story in which the author's secret life involves not sexuality but blindness. Kuusisto, with a condition of the retinas that left him legally blind at birth, was raised by parents who denied his handicap. Consequently, he grew up disavowing his blindness and pretending to be able to see much better than he really could. He sees, he writes, ``through smeared and broken windowpanes,'' his impressions of the world ``at once beautiful and largely useless.'' A ridiculed child, at first obese and later anorexic, he developed a love for words, especially poetry. Despite his limitations, he graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, was a Fulbright scholar in Finland, and taught creative writing at Hobart College for seven years. When that job ended, Kuusisto, alone, unemployed, and desperate, found himself face-to-face with the undeniable fact of his blindness, and he at last reached out for the help he'd always needed. After accepting the stigmatizing white cane of the blind that he had rejected ten years earlier, and learning to relish the safety and mobility it gave him, he moved on to Corky, a guide dog that changed his life entirely. Today, Kuusisto is director of student services for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a training school where the blind are matched with guide dogs and trained to use them. He no longer pretends he can see what others see; at age 39, he says, he has chosen to be blind ``in a forceful way.'' Athough portions of this memoir have appeared in various literary magazines (Antioch Review, Harper's, etc.), the presentation here is seamless. An astonishing, occasionally dismaying, and sometimes heart-breaking glimpse of life on the planet of the blind. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31615-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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