Sappy toward the end, but mostly uplifting and profound.
With the assistance of People editor Dyball (co-author: A Famous Dog's Life: The Story of Gidget, America's Most Beloved Chihuahua, 2011, etc.), first-time author DiDonato tells the remarkable tale of her lifelong battle to overcome diastrophic dysplasia, a crippling genetic disorder that not only causes unusually short limbs, but chronic arthritis.
While many children long to be taller, the author decided early on to do whatever it took to combat her body’s literal shortcomings so she could perform such ordinary tasks as taking out the trash. Born with clubbed feet, the author underwent her first corrective surgery when she was 2 days old and then again at the age 2. With arms so short she couldn’t reach her own ears or other body parts, DiDonato improvised, employing salad tongs to wipe herself and help pull up her socks. But at 8 years of age and standing only 3 feet 8 inches tall, the constant desire for greater independence led her and her mother to seek out radical bone-lengthening treatments. A veteran of dozens of childhood surgeries, DiDonato viewed the pain and temporary immobility resulting from these grueling procedures as mere means to an end. Having gained four inches from her first lengthening surgeries and endured their torturous aftermath, the author chose to undertake the procedures again at 15, seeking out a surgeon who would enable her to risk going beyond the recommended additional three inches in height to whatever length her body could take. Throughout this engaging memoir, the author’s resolve to do “whatever it takes to live an independent life” proves unwavering, even in the face of criticism from others facing similar challenges who considered her choices motivated by a lack of self-acceptance.
Sappy toward the end, but mostly uplifting and profound.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-452-29811-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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