A poignantly uplifting memoir of moving forward after terrible loss.
A Brooklyn-based music journalist’s account of his 2-year-old daughter’s accidental death and his journey to acceptance of her passing.
One day, Greene and his wife, Stacy, left Greta with her grandmother. Shockingly, a brick from an eighth-story windowsill fell on Greta’s skull, causing irreversible brain damage. Overcome with grief and guilt for having “failed this little person so completely,” the couple struggled to fit the shattered pieces of their life together again. “Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it,” he writes, “a blinding fission of every emotion.” A bitter rage made Greene hate the “unexamined happiness” of the people—especially parents—he saw around him while Stacy was forced to confront not only her own anguish, but that of her mother. After feeling Greta’s presence in a local park, the author suddenly realized that “there will be more light upon this earth for me.” He and Stacy began attending grief workshops, one of which included a medium who encouraged them to “pay attention to signs” from their loved ones. They also decided to leave the home where Greta “padd[ed] agreeably around every corner” and start a new life—complete with what they hoped would one day be another child—elsewhere in the city. They took up yoga while Greene “became a prospector for safe screaming spaces” where he could release pent-up emotional suffering. After the couple discovered they were pregnant, they went to see a ceremonialist in New Mexico who they hoped would help them process Greta’s death along with the impending birth of the son who would never know his sister. The powerful visions of death and rebirth they experienced helped them to understand and embrace the brokenness within themselves with love, grace, and gratitude. Compassionate and sensitively told, Greene’s story accomplishes an exceptionally difficult feat: transforming tragedy into both a spiritual journey and a celebration of wonder.
A poignantly uplifting memoir of moving forward after terrible loss.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3353-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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