A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.
A mother explores her grief and finds strength in a group of women whose children have all been diagnosed with HIV.
In 1987, at the age of 31, Loebl’s son David told her that he was HIV-positive. The author, who immigrated to the United States after World War II, had only just begun to address her fears and accept her son’s homosexuality. Upon the diagnosis, however, she immediately put her questioning aside and devoted herself to David’s care. His exuberant young friends welcomed her as one of the rare supportive parents in their community, and Loebl found independence in her frequent trips from New York to visit David in San Francisco. But caring for an adult son is a delicate ordeal, and Loebl was wary of suffocating him. In a rich exploration of the competing priorities of motherhood, Loebl recalls the need to be strong for David while simultaneously hiding her own depression. Unable to reveal her pain to David or her family, Loebl joined a support group for mothers of children with AIDS, but her relationship to the group was tinged with ambivalence. The sad stories exhausted her, as did the frequent funerals that reminded her how deceptive were David’s verve and healthful good looks. But the author ultimately found comfort in the group, sharing hope and news of treatments. Ten years after the diagnosis, with no cure in sight, she reached out to the group to prepare emotionally for David’s death. With disarmingly direct, unsentimental prose, the author makes her grief palpable, as she quietly observes her son in moments of hysteria, pleading for her late into the night; in episodes of understated resilience as he forges ahead in relationships; in work and in his love of theatre and dance. Through her nuanced analysis of the psychology of others–from her son and husband to the kaleidoscope of women in her support group–the author reveals plenty of herself as well.
A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-41575-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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