A hopeful and heart-gladdening memoir.
Meck cobbles together fragments of her life after a traumatic brain injury.
Living with her husband, Jim, and their two toddler boys in Texas, the author’s life changed dramatically in 1988 when a ceiling fan fell on her head. She passed out, and the paramedic’s penlight showed one dilated pupil, one shrunk, and no response to pricks to her fingers and toes. Meck slipped into a coma, and the family prepared for her passing, but she pulled through. However, she had full loss of her episodic memory (recollections of specific events from one’s lived experience) and a good portion of her semantic memory (the recollection of facts; she had about a 100-word vocabulary and was confounded by a fork), and her procedural memory was about as developed as a reptile’s. Meck’s narrative, written with the assistance of award-winning journalist de Visé, moves forward in fits and starts; for years, she lived in a hazy world, unable to read (she learned along with her sons), falling out of chairs, suffering bouts of dizziness and blackouts, and forgetting faces almost instantaneously, including her husband's and children’s. She tried in vain to mimic other peoples’ actions, and she could not discern the function of a hairbrush or how a drinking cup works. Meck relates these tortured years of slowly gathering herself together, then dropping a step or two back, with an unmodulated inflection. She was baffled by routine, feigned comprehension, was pained by sex—though she did have the saving grace of a fast blossoming of love between mother and children. There has been progress on many fronts, she writes, but most days are still a struggle. “Part of me realizes that I will never really know exactly what I was like before my head injury,” she writes, “but another part of me stubbornly refuses to give up as I try desperately to fit pieces together in an ever-changing life-size puzzle.”
A hopeful and heart-gladdening memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8581-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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