At turns harrowing and inspiring; also serves as a valuable piece of education on recovery from brain injury.
Brandon’s debut memoir details her experiences with her “bloody brain,” from stays in the intensive care unit to a turbulent life after surgery.
In 2007, Brandon worked as a math professor at Carnegie Mellon, well respected among students and colleagues. After experiencing strange symptoms—bouts of confusion and numbness—doctors discovered cavernous angiomas in Brandon’s brain and brain stem. These angiomas, described as “malformed blood vessels in [the] brain,” cause severe problems when they bleed. After initial treatment, Brandon’s doctors believed that she was out of danger. Within six months, however, the bleeds came back. She experienced multiple seizures and frequent bouts of confusion. Brandon decided to have a risky set of surgeries to remove the angiomas. The surgery was successful, but its invasive nature forced Brandon into extensive rehab. Recovery from brain injury doesn’t occur linearly, though, and Brandon dealt with myriad mental and physical issues, including re-establishing her balance and retraining herself to read. Once out of rehab, Brandon found support from friends and family. Not everyone initially understood her situation, however, often carelessly adding to her discomfort. Brandon ably describes her episodes, and the reader feels transported into her mind when, for instance, she has a “shutdown,” her brain momentarily shutting down after an overflow of sensory input, “settling into...a protective cocoon.” These moments succeed in making readers understand Brandon’s plight, her frustrations, and, eventually, her triumphs. The memoir follows a chronological timeline, but there are also chapters that focus on small experiences, interruptions not unlike the stop-and-start nature of her recovery. In the end, Brandon doesn’t sugarcoat her account. Despite her eventual return to teaching, the reader ultimately knows there will be more to overcome.
At turns harrowing and inspiring; also serves as a valuable piece of education on recovery from brain injury.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-246-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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