The news that his mother is dying of cancer transforms a journalist's inquiry into the growing hospice movement—what might have been a full-fledged investigative report becomes a moving, highly personal memoir. Brookes, who teaches writing at the University of Vermont and whose essays are heard frequently on National Public Radio, demonstrated his skill at weaving reporting and personal experience into a seamless whole in his exploration of asthma (Catching My Breath, 1994). Here the personal story takes clear precedence. When Brookes began his research, he decided he needed to see a dead body and arranged to view an embalmed cadaver awaiting dissection in a laboratory. It was an unsettling experience. Months later, he was called to the bedside of his dying mother at a hospice in England. Between these two charged events, Brookes learned a great deal about life at its extreme, the needs of the dying, our fear of death, the differences between suffering and pain, the limits of palliative care, and the gap between hospice philosophy and real-life practice. An exile, he also learned a great deal about what home and family meant to him. From time to time, there's a hint of what the book might have been had circumstances been different. As a reporter, Brookes looks at the hospice movement with a far more critical eye than hospice doctors do in their own writings (see Michael Kearney, Mortally Wounded, p. 1996, and Ira Byock, Dying Well, 1996). Noting its persistent confusion over the nature of its spiritual mission, he comments that the hospice movement's ``graceful New Age ecumenical dance'' is likely to be pulled apart by the stronger forces of medical science and established religion. An affecting memoir by a talented writer that leaves the reader regretting that he did not probe even more widely and deeply into the nature and role of the hospice.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8129-2468-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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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