A tender tribute to Edith and her will to do things her way.
The true story of how two adversaries became good friends.
When Martin became project superintendent in charge of building a new shopping mall in Ballard, Wash., he had no idea how his life would be changed by the one woman who refused to sell her house to the developers. Even though she'd been offered $1 million for her place, Edith wouldn't move. However, she was in her 80s and in need of help, so, with some trepidation, Martin took on the role of caregiver. After all, "this was a feisty old woman who seemed to have every intention of hanging on for a long time, and making my life as difficult as possible in the process." At first, he did little things, like driving Edith to her hair appointments, then he began cooking for her; eventually, as her health steadily declined, Martin became her main means of support. While the mall went up around her, Edith's personal walls came down, and Martin caught glimpses of the myriad, almost improbable lives she had lived. Told with frankness and sincerity, Martin, with the assistance of former USA Today editor Lerman, skillfully blends his deep desire to aid Edith with his frustrations with this cantankerous woman, his need to spend time with his own children and wife, and his thoughts and feelings toward his ailing parents. With a bit of humor and the determination to do right by this stranger-turned–close friend, Martin was able to help Edith do as she wished—spend the last years of her life in her home, surrounded by a lifetime's accumulation of books, music and trinkets.
A tender tribute to Edith and her will to do things her way.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00304-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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