An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.
Rudnick’s debut memoir examines her complicated relationship with her developmentally disabled sibling as well as her own tumultuous path to self-acceptance and fulfillment.
The author was born in New York City in 1944 to German immigrant parents, and her sister, Edna Jane Wile, was born a year later. As young children, the girls were inseparable, but when they entered school, it became increasingly apparent that Edna was lagging behind the other kids. She could read, but she couldn’t comprehend abstract concepts; she was mobile, but she was unable to walk with a normal gait; and she didn’t have any friends. The author, however, excelled in school and had an active social life. Increasingly, she felt guilty about leaving Edna behind; she saw her sister as a visual manifestation of her family’s differentness, she says, which embarrassed her and made her angry and confused. When Edna was 14, the girls’ mother found a camp/residential school in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which would cater to her special needs. “Except for vacations, we would never live together again,” Rudnick writes. The author soon discovered that she had her own, hidden disability—she’d been born without a uterus and with an incomplete vaginal canal. It was a devastating blow, she says, that affected the rest of her life. Rudnick is a talented writer, often displaying a keen ability to capture emotional intensity through concise prose. For example, she reveals at the memoir’s outset that “Edna was my most treasured companion” and “almost every night I crawled into her bed. With her soft skin, she was so cuddly, so squeezable. I felt safe when I was close to her.” As a result, readers are likely to be unsurprised that Rudnick eventually became a practicing psychotherapist. That said, the passages describing the author’s four marriages and three divorces sound clinically detached by contrast.
An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-515-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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