An honest and eloquent look at life from someone who has lost two of her senses.
One woman's story of gradually losing her sight and hearing.
From the age of 12, Alexander knew her life was going to change. Born with two recessive genes that cause type-III Usher syndrome, the author was told she would experience the gradual loss of her hearing and sight until she would be completely blind and deaf. With honesty and compassion, she details the slow, steady progression of her disease even as she tried to hide her disabilities from her friends, boyfriends and co-workers. Realizing that her world was narrowing, Alexander excelled in school, played soccer and delivered meals to HIV/AIDs patients. However, she continued to deny she had any physical ailments. Then, just after high school graduation, calamity struck. Drunk and nearly blind in the dark, Alexander stumbled off her balcony, landing 27 feet below on a stone patio; she broke every limb in her body except her right foot and leg. Multiple surgeries and months of physical therapy forced Alexander to make conscious decisions about her future. After attending the University of Michigan, she moved to New York City and attended Columbia, double majoring in social work and public health. She became a spin instructor, fell in and out of love, and continued to assess the pros and cons of her disabilities. She could shut out the never-ending sounds of the city by removing her hearing aids, but then she could no longer hear a person whisper in her ear. She couldn't really see the stars, but she loved the feel of a person signing into her hands in the dark. As she steadily accepted her fate, Alexander emphasized the importance of embracing the here and now, of being present and grateful for the gift of life, in whatever shape it might take.
An honest and eloquent look at life from someone who has lost two of her senses.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-831-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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