A poignant, wise love story.
With the assistance of Witter (Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, 2011, etc.), crime reporter Spencer-Wendel chronicles her life and the decisions she has made since being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a wasting disease that progressively causes loss of control of voluntary muscle movement. In her mid-40s and a happily married mother of three with a thriving career, the author rejected the option of assisted suicide in favor of making her last years memorable despite the inevitability of increasing disability. Although not believing that her death would ruin the lives of her husband and children, she understood that it might “affect their ability to live with delight. To live with joy.” Spencer-Wendel was determined to overcome her dread of losing mobility and to live her life to the fullest even as the disease progressed. As inspiration, the author found solace in Lou Gehrig's 1939 farewell speech, in which he described himself as “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, even after 'catching a bad break.’ ” The author decided to spend her remaining time traveling to places she longed to see, taking friends and family with her. In this way, she left them a legacy of joyfully shared memories. One of the more difficult decisions she made was not to hoard her remaining good health. She determined that she would not search out experimental programs, nor even spare herself physical strain, even though traveling took a further toll on her mobility. Each of the trips more than met the author's expectations: a visit with her son to swim with dolphins, shopping in New York with her daughter and a journey with her husband to Romania, where they lived for the first two years of their marriage.
A poignant, wise love story.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0062241450
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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