A potent memoir that rips open a most human heart.
One moment, she is on her bicycle; the next, she is on the ground, her life forever transformed by an accident that leaves her a quadriplegic.
Crosby, who still teaches part-time at Wesleyan University (English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and has published scholarly works (The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question,” 1991), offers a painfully, even courageously candid memoir about her accident in 2003 and its aftermath. She says she has no memory of the moment when a branch caught in her front wheel and sent her hurtling to the ground, a collision that shattered her jaw and broke vertebrae, but she tells about her long period of rehab and the devotion of friends and, especially, of her lover, Janet. She occasionally returns to her pre-accident life to tell about her family—with special attention to her brother, Jeff, who suffered profoundly from multiple sclerosis and who died some years after her accident. The author notes the cruel unlikelihood that two siblings would become quadriplegic. Along the way, we hear about her growing awareness of her sexuality, of her great fondness for sex, her issues with alcohol, and of the active physical and intellectual life that she adored. She writes in wrenching detail about her constant pain, her bowels, her sex life, and her determination to craft a new way to live. She writes affectingly about the home-care professionals who have helped her, noting how much we all depend on them and how little we pay them. She uses poems by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and a former student to illuminate her situation; she discusses the importance to her of George Eliot. Occasionally, she slips into academic-speak (quoting from various authorities), but it’s never for long and never enough to slow the emotional momentum she so carefully creates.
A potent memoir that rips open a most human heart.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3353-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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