A misty memoir of amnesia triggered by a swimming pool accident, and the slow, painful retrieval of memory. The swimming-pool episode was apparently caused by an epileptic seizure, and Robinson was to learn that she had suffered from undiagnosed epilepsy since she was a child. The daughter of writer/movie mogul Dore Schary, she grew up in southern California, where her schoolmates and playmates were the likes of Robert Redford. A career as a relatively successful novelist (Star Country, 1996, etc.) included two husbands and two children before she settled in London with her third spouse, the extaordinarily patient and understanding hero of this work. When Robinson wakes from a brief coma following the accident, she doesn—t know him. Although she accepts his and others’ word that this man is her husband, it’s apparently years before she is able to collate the memories of their mutual history. The Hollywood years are most vivid to the starstruck Robinson, and within the first 20 pages, there is mention of Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, and Cary Grant, with Barbra Streisand (a good friend), Erica Jong, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, and others. Most interesting are descriptions of Robinson’s efforts to restore her memory, including reading her husband’s detailed journals of their years together and rereading her own books. She also keeps careful notes of day-to-day encounters, because she often cannot recall from one room to the next where she is or why she is there. She continues to write and never loses her ability to cook or her taste for clothes. A new doctor and new medication to control the seizures assist in her recovery. An intriguing but confusing view from inside the author’s head that would be considerably improved by observations from the likes of Barbra and Erica about their now-forgetful friend.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019430-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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