A flawed but heartfelt account of dedication and devotion.
A bestselling historical novelist’s account of how she survived the harrowing year following her young husband’s unexpected stroke.
Pataki (Sisi, Empress on Her Own, 2016, etc.) and her husband, David Levy, were a charmed pair. Intelligent and privileged, both attended Yale University, where they first met as freshmen in 2003. David initially struck the author as a “self-involved, beer-swilling jock.” Over time, however, it became clear that he was not only athletic, but also brilliant and everything that Pataki could ever hope for in a man. Their fairy-tale courtship survived college and a transition to New York, where the author focused on building a career in journalism and David, on building one in medicine. The pair married eight years after they met in a ceremony that, like so much of their relationship, “went off without a hitch.” They moved to Chicago, where Pataki made an extremely successful transition into fiction writing while her husband began the grueling years of his residency at Rush University. In 2015, just as a now-pregnant Pataki was beginning her third book, David suffered a devastating stroke. The result of medically negligible imperfections in David’s anatomy and “a handful of unique situational circumstances,” the event was unthinkable for someone who was just 30. It was “so improbable that there was not even medical literature available” for doctors to consult. Miraculously, the youthful plasticity of David’s brain helped him recover within a year’s time to lead a normal yet permanently altered life. Supportive friends and family helped Pataki endure the aftermath of her husband’s illness, which she dealt with by writing “Dear Dave” letters—some of which she interweaves into the narrative—that chronicled their struggles. The strength of this end-of-innocence book lies in its demystification of the idea that strokes only occur in older people. At the same time, however, the story’s emotional intimacy often verges on overdone sentimentality.
A flawed but heartfelt account of dedication and devotion.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59165-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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