A singularly compelling memoir.
A father finds his life transformed when his son is born with cerebral palsy, as illuminated through this masterfully written memoir.
The structuring of this book, by Venice-based Brazilian author Mainardi, might initially seem overly precious or gimmicky. Each very short section (a paragraph or two, a photo, a drawing) is numbered, with each representing a step taken by the author’s son, Tito, before he inevitably falls. The 424 steps here represent a monumental achievement, for, as the author notes, the “sixteen steps Tito took on 28 September 2005 became, some months later, twenty-seven steps. Some months later, the seven steps became forty-four steps….” Ultimately, the structuring provides a sturdy frame that allows Mainardi to avoid sentimentality or wallowing in grief (or rage at the Venetian hospital that bungled the birth), while showing how the unconditional love the parents have for their son has transformed the author’s world. He connects everything to Tito’s destiny—from the architecture that drew him to the hospital to “Hitler’s ‘euthanasia’ program [that] offered ‘mercy killings’ to those whose lives were ‘worthless’ or ‘not worth living’ ” to Neil Young’s experience with two sons born with cerebral palsy and the music that resulted in such unlikely juxtapositions as, “No one falls better than James Joyce. Apart from Lou Costello.” As the author of four published novels and a column in the Brazilian magazine Veja, Mainardi now thinks of himself: “I am Tito’s father. I exist only because Tito exists.” Tito emerges as collaborator in the book—not as a cause or a type or a symbol but as a happy, well-adjusted, well-loved individual with a life well worth living.
A singularly compelling memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-700-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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