Empathetic, vividly rendered and impossible to put down.
An American poet recalls the medical maladies that befell him in college and beyond.
While a freshman at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., in the late 1990s, Lemon (Hallelujah Blackout, 2008, etc.) began experiencing episodes of blurry vision, mouth bleeds, dizziness, fainting spells and memory loss. He was slated to be the catcher on Macalester’s baseball team, but his symptoms combined to transform him into a tortured zombie. Nicknamed “Happy” by his college buddies, the author became anything but. An MRI test showed that he had suffered a brain aneurysm from a lesion precariously situated on his brain stem. Though doctors insisted he would eventually recover from the stroke, he continued to experience unexplained anger and embarrassing erectile dysfunction, and he eventually attempted suicide. Recalling his childhood sexual abuse exacerbated matters. Another hemorrhage forced Lemon to endure a risky brain operation to excise the lesion. The pain, confusion, panic and frustration of living a young life saddled with a possibly lethal medical crisis thrusted him into a depressive state pacified only with copious amounts of alcohol, drugs and denial. It was a long road back to some semblance of normalcy, but the author finally emerged healthier and relatively happy—thanks, in part, to his valiant single mother (“Ma”), a hilariously memorable artist who helped rehabilitate her son with unflagging love and much-needed stability. Lemon’s writing is saturated with beautifully descriptive passages, and the narrative flows with an unrushed, conversational cadence. His prose shimmers in places readers will least expect: the running track at the break of dawn, the view from the floor of his dorm room after he collapses (“The world whirls when I crack open. Bookshelf, poster board, the windows wink their eyes…Every light pulses yelloworange and brilliant, and the TV is a blue splash”), a doctor’s clinical, measured movements, and breathlessly divulging the crushing diagnosis to his family (“the truth drops through me like a rain of nails”).
Empathetic, vividly rendered and impossible to put down.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5023-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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