Price’s story is intriguing, but ultimately fails to shed light on a little-understood subject.
Think having near-perfect recall would be a huge asset? The first person ever diagnosed with hyperthymestic syndrome begs to differ.
“Imagine if someone had made videos of you from the time you were a child,” writes Price in a memorable description of what it’s like to recall practically every detail from your life, “and then combined them all onto one DVD, and you sat in a room and watched that DVD on a machine set to shuffle randomly through the tracks…I never know what I might remember next.” She wasn’t afflicted by this “gift” during her childhood in New York and New Jersey. But when her father was offered a promotion from talent agent to TV executive and moved the family to California in the fall of 1974, eight-year-old Price’s mind began to fill up with memories of every minute in her past. After February 5, 1980, she states, she had perfect recall. This endlessly distracting ability caused her to become a pack rat with possessions and obsessive-compulsive about recording her experiences (the total number of pages in her journals tops 50,000). In 2000, Price connected with Dr. James L. McGaugh, professor emeritus at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, who began to study her heretofore unknown but quite real condition. Price has a knack for vividly rendering childhood memories like scenes from an impressionistic film. The chronicle of her adult life, unfortunately, is told in stiff, repetitive prose that leaches out much of her story’s impact. The memoir’s effectiveness as a personal document is further muffled by a large amount of material on memory research presented in an overly general fashion.
Price’s story is intriguing, but ultimately fails to shed light on a little-understood subject.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6176-7
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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