A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.
Surviving and thriving as a family with autistic twins.
Ana and Curt Warner take turns narrating this powerful tale of life with twin boys with autism. The couple met while Curt was a successful member of the Seattle Seahawks, but this isn’t a sports story. An early priority for the Warners was to build a family, but they first suffered from a tragic stillbirth and miscarriages. Finally, a healthy son, Jonathan, was born, soon followed by twin boys, Austin and Christian. It was soon clear that the twins were not developing normally, but despite a series of physician visits, no answers could be found. At last, they found a doctor who realized right away that the twins had autism, which was, at the time, a little-understood disorder. The Warners’ story is both heart-wrenching and also uplifting, as they chronicle how they learned to handle two children who kicked holes in walls, ate tongue depressors in the doctor’s office, discovered new ways to escape the house, and watched Disney films with absolute obsession. The family struggled through isolation, misplaced guilt, anger, and radical changes in lifestyle, ranging from diet to constant home repair. Two low points drive home the difficulties the couple faced. First, there were Ana’s thoughts of suicide, in which she imagined freeing her husband and older son by driving herself and the twins off a cliff. Second, while playing out a scene from a Disney film, Austin set the family’s house on fire, destroying it and nearly taking his mother’s life. Despite unimaginable struggles, the family survived and even adopted a baby girl. The twins, meanwhile, moved into early adulthood with part-time jobs. Rather than delve into arguments over the causes of autism, the authors focus on awareness and the need for support.
A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0056-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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