A frank, bitingly humorous memoir.
A performance artist recounts the painful metamorphosis that warped her youth.
Prior to age nine, the only characteristic distinguishing the author’s childhood from that of countless other Texans was that much of it had been spent with her family in Berlin, where her Army father had been stationed. But that year, gradually and without warning, Galloway lost her hearing and found her vision severely impaired. She also began to experience out-of-body hallucinations. The first to discover the diminishment of her senses was her fourth-grade teacher, who noticed that the top-notch student who used to sit at the front of the class had begun to struggle when she was moved to the back. A battery of tests soon revealed both the severity of Galloway’s hearing and vision problems and the cause—the antibiotic mycin, which had been used to treat a severe kidney infection that her mother suffered during her pregnancy. Learning that the drug was already known to cause fetal complications at the time it was administered to her mother—along with the stories of other handicapped friends’ traumatic births—crippled Galloway. She was overcome with a “paranoid sense that every corner of the world has a mean streak” and experienced an “existential funk” she still wrestles with decades later. “The whole round world,” she writes, “can feel like a single eye glaring at your flawed body asking the unanswerable of you in particular—‘Why ever should you matter?’ ” In addition to dealing with her “overwhelming loss of faith,” the author also struggled with her sexual identity, finally coming to the realization that she was gay. Though institutionalized twice and close to committing suicide “eleven and a half” times, Galloway turned to performance, taking her needs for connection to the cabaret stage and now to the page.
A frank, bitingly humorous memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7290-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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