Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow...
A gripping portrayal of how the lives of a wife and her husband were forever changed when the husband incurred permanent brain damage.
Feminist author Shulman (A Good Enough Daughter, 1999, etc.)—a fiercely independent woman whose marriage was based on autonomy and freedom and for whom privacy and time for her writing were paramount—was suddenly deprived of both when her husband Scott’s traumatic brain injury left him dependent and demented, yet still loving and lovable. Within the details of the accident and the aftermath—a ten-foot fall in the middle of the night on a small island off the coast of Maine, his rescue, his subsequent time in hospitals and rehab and his return home—the author interweaves the story of their unusual romance. It began with a teenage crush in 1950, followed by a 34-year hiatus in which each married, had children and divorced (she twice). Their relationship resumed in 1984, and by the time of the accident they had been together for some 20 years. Her early misunderstanding of the doctors’ prognosis—she thought he would return to normal in one year—was gradually replaced by the stark realization that while physical improvements in strength and mobility were possible, his mental capacities, including his short-term memory, were gone. How she dealt with this shattering knowledge and managed his care, as well as how their relationship changed, comprise the core of this compelling love story. Although she rejoiced in his small triumphs and basked in his warmth and charm, the author includes the frightening episodes when he disappeared or became so hostile and violent that she called the police.
Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow reassuring.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-27815-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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