Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by...
Fevered prose and wild digressions mark a poet’s candid memoir of pain and illness.
In 1999, when he was 21, Lemon (English/Texas Christian Univ.; The Wish Book: Poems, 2014, etc.) underwent surgery because of a bleeding vascular malformation in his brain stem, a procedure that caused severe debilities. “Medical clinics and hospitals have become a second home,” he writes, as he seeks diagnosis and treatment for a host of problems: painful swallowing, facial numbness, tremors, leg and back cramps, paresthesia, chronic constipation, ulcerated mouth sores, double vision, panic attacks, depression, insomnia, and exhaustion. “Always,” he writes, “it seems that I’m waiting for the results of a procedure that will tell me how close I am to death.” Added to this list is psychological trauma from having been sexually abused, when was 3, by a cousin who threatened to kill his family if he told anyone. At the time, Lemon writes, he wasn’t sure what was happening or whether it was “really bad. Maybe I deserve it,” he thought. “Maybe a part of me likes it.” Yet since then, he has been burdened by the effects of his cousin’s repeated cruelty. He learns that such trauma cuts the victim off from experiencing sensations and emotions that could be overwhelming, and he struggles, he writes, “to recalibrate my ‘felt sense.’ ” Lemon’s kaleidoscopic, occasionally scattershot chapters offer a collage of dreams, hallucinations, childhood memories, anecdotes about his wife and young son, references to literature, art, and popular culture, and, of course, the state of his body and mind. “Like So Many Nightmares,” for example, begins with his reading Rilke at daybreak and then segues into Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, Freud, Jung, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anti-war protests in Minneapolis in 2003. “Knowledge is everywhere in the coming daylight,” he reflects, as his mind swerves and swirls through “an emporium of collisions and adoration” that illuminates for him the miracle of survival.
Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by suffering.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57131-336-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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