A compassionate and frank look at depression and the social pressure faced by many college students as seen through the eyes...
What led to one teen athlete’s suicide.
When Maddy Holleran began attending college at the University of Pennsylvania and continued her athletic career as a member of the track team, she and everyone who knew her could only imagine the best for this outgoing and popular 19-year-old. But as her freshman year progressed, Maddy slipped into depression, falling deeper and deeper into a black pit that surprised and confused her. She attempted to maintain appearances, writing cheery text messages and Facebook posts, but inside, she felt increasingly numb and unhappy. Friends, relatives, and counselors told her it was normal, the type of homesickness and transitional unhappiness almost every first-year student experienced, and that she would get through it. But they were all wrong. Using Maddy’s text messages, emails, letters, and information compiled from family and friends, ESPN columnist Fagan (The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians, 2014, etc.) expertly re-creates the last months of Maddy’s life. Interspersed with Maddy’s story is an analysis of the type of commitment that is required to be a college athlete and the building pressure that many college students feel to appear happy, healthy, and successful in their given paths, despite any underlying doubt or despair. The author pays particular attention to the increasingly prominent role of social media and the disparity when one compares the online persona of someone like Maddy, who gave no definite indication that something was seriously wrong, with the actual issues at hand. Echoing the feelings Maddy must have felt, Fagan includes personal reflections on her own college athletic career, her desire to quit playing basketball, and the difficulty she had in figuring out what to do.
A compassionate and frank look at depression and the social pressure faced by many college students as seen through the eyes of one young woman.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35654-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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