A warm, unique memoir about coping with disease.
DeSousa’s debut memoir chronicles her first year living with multiple sclerosis and some of the lessons she learned along the way.
DeSousa looks to infuse humor and wit into her life-changing first year with MS. Her vivid, accessible voice is a strength of her book, and she puts a humorous spin on the debilitating disease to cope with its effects on her body. While the irreverence is a hook, it also subtly serves to demystify some of the most confusing aspects of MS, a condition still misunderstood. Explanations about the effects on muscles, cognitive function and even hearing give readers insight into some of the daily struggles of those living with MS. The humor, however, sometimes overshadows the narrative arc and structure of the book. It’s wonderful to be able to hear the author’s voice so clearly, but at times it assumes a rambling, almost too-casual quality that attempts several conversational paths without sticking to one, leaving the reader a little befuddled. Likewise, many anecdotes about DeSousa’s everyday life—working at a medical office, teaching at Sunday school, eating junk food, getting over an ex-boyfriend—can be honed and trimmed. On the whole, DeSousa is personable and engaging. For instance, in a slightly too-long section about halfway through the book, the author describes cooking a recommended vegetable dish because cookies “aren’t very healthy.” The author’s grace shines through even in quieter moments, and those qualities shape the work just as much as the humor. The final chapter advises her readers that, “It is okay to be really really mad at this obnoxious, damaging, and weird disease….But moving forward is something I insist on.”
A warm, unique memoir about coping with disease.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989972369
Page Count: 240
Publisher: SDP Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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