Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.
Black (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, 2011) details how she coped with the death of her father, then with a series of illnesses and other devastating personal losses.
The author’s father, a professor of math at MIT, was her best friend, especially during her teenage years. When she became “suspicious about the nature of existence,” he was always there to counter her fears with his no-nonsense “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” view of life. His decline and death not long after she graduated from Harvard upended her world. Already unsure what she would do with her life, Black “stopped paying [her] bills and doing laundry” as she battled an eating disorder. She sought work halfheartedly, first as a movie theater usher and then an ice cream server. Just as she began making peace with her father’s death, the author finally stumbled into a job as a proofreader. She bought a house in the country, found Jesus, and met the writer-boyfriend she christened “the Last of the Last Great Men.” Her happily settled life took an unexpected turn for the worse when she suddenly began to experience disturbing physical symptoms that no doctor or health test could explain. She then embarked on a medical odyssey that seemed to end with a diagnosis of mold illness. Even after she began treatment and got rid of her home and all her infected possessions, she continued to have symptoms that defied medical logic. Hysterical, Black took out her frustrations on her long-suffering boyfriend, who eventually left. Visits to the many subsequent specialists she saw in her quest for answers showed that her gut was not only a “Disneyland for pathogens,” but that she was suffering from iron overload. Though at times overly disjointed, the book still succeeds in offering a candid depiction of a woman’s struggle with her own vulnerabilities as she seeks to understand the “pile of terrifyingly beautiful rubble” left in the wake of all her struggles.
Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0059-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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