Prolific novelist and critic Sheed recounts his winning battles with polio, cancer, and what he calls ``addiction- depression'' in this lucid, gently humorous memoir. Like William Styron, Sheed (My Life as a Fan, 1993, etc.) suffered clinical depression instigated by a dependence on alcohol (and, in Sheed's case, pills). Unlike Darkness Visible, Styron's harrowing account of the descent into madness, Sheed's reckoning emphasizes recovery more than illness—the joyful daylight of health after the dark night of disease. For Sheed, a childhood- polio survivor who contends that ``suffering carries its own antidote,'' the battle royal is against addiction and depression; in comparison, cancer and polio seem mere tests of his considerable, gruff will. That will and his healthy respect for the strength ordinary mortals summon in life-threatening circumstances are severely tried by attempts to kick sleeping pills. Sheed chafes at the one-disease-fits-all absolutism and AA platitudes espoused at a Betty Fordstyle rehab center. A man of redoubtable bonhomie, he rejects the call to abandon the old, good life—a wise choice, since desire to recapture that joie de vivre (sans booze and pills) is his strongest motivation for recovering. Seeking a ``simple physical explanation'' for the deterioration of mind and body, Sheed finds only ``airy-fairy'' talk on his rounds of MDs and shrinks. The appalling ignorance and indifference he encounters from doctors (he avoids prostate surgery only after a second opinion pinpoints Prozac as the source of a bladder problem; the first doctor never bothered to ask about medication) push Sheed to fashion his own vocabulary for describing his illness. Along the way he decries the culture of victimization America embraces, replacing it with a vision of ordinary people capable of ``latent heroism.'' Sheed's plainspoken, self-deprecating memoir forges a realistic but hopeful record of addiction-depression's long arc that may well serve those suffering from it.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79215-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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