A unique and haunting story.
A former British civil servant’s debut memoir about learning to live with a rare light-sensitivity disorder that forces her to spend months living in complete darkness.
Though Lyndsey sometimes questioned her job at the Department of Work and Pensions in London, she loved what she did and the security her position offered. But in April 2005, she made a disturbing discovery. Whenever she sat in front of her computer screen, the skin on her face burned “like the worst kind of sunburn.” At first, she suspected sensitivity to artificial and especially fluorescent lights. By June, however, Lyndsey’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer tolerate light of any kind, including sunlight. Forced to abandon her job, she moved into her boyfriend (and later husband) Pete’s house. There, she spent her days dressed head to toe in light-impermeable clothes in a room that blacked out all traces of sunshine. Her only companions were audiobooks and complex word games, both of which she used to keep herself from sliding further into despair. Realizing that her condition was medically untreatable and likely permanent, she began reaching out telephonically to others who she discovered had similar conditions. These friends became conduits through which she received “massive transfusions of life.” Over time, she found that she would experience brief periods when “the muttering in [her] skin” ceased and she could go outside at dawn and dusk with a photographic light meter to help her measure how much light she could withstand. As much as the book is about coping with a life-altering condition, it is also a quiet love story that celebrates a relationship that not only withstood the ups and downs of Lyndsey’s medical struggles, but also deepened in the process.
A unique and haunting story.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0385539609
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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