A well-written, emotionally uplifting tale of friendships, extreme illnesses, and understanding what love truly means.
How sickness showed the author the full value of friendships and love.
When Fisher first met Allison, a woman 30 years her senior, she never imagined how life-changing that moment would be. “It was not love at first sight,” she writes. “Or second, or third, or even ninth. For the first year that we knew each other, all I could see was that she was different from me.” Eventually, they experienced the gradual development of a deep, loving bond that kept them close friends until Allison’s death from cancer. By that time, Fisher was experiencing her own health woes, including possible brain cancer and problems with mysterious mold and environmental issues. Allison’s patience and loving nature were the main factors in helping the author weather her illnesses, as she learned to let go of control so that the love and trust her friends provided her really sank in and made a difference in her life. Fisher shares her reflections and insights into these loving relationships—both platonic and sexual—as well as her battles with addiction in a deeply personal yet accessible manner; readers will experience the subtle changes along with her as the narrative progresses. Reflecting on the way Allison helped her change her outlook, she writes, “I had never been touched or held with a kind of pure and untrammeled love before, a love that wasn’t clouded by anxieties, or by sexual desire, or by the awkwardness of being in a young body that doesn’t know how to touch, or that—most important—didn’t request anything of me.” It is the revelation that love can be unconditional and profound that makes this memoir stand out from many similar ones. Fisher is not just another survivor of a grave illness; she has been transformed by letting another person love her without constraint.
A well-written, emotionally uplifting tale of friendships, extreme illnesses, and understanding what love truly means.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-544-99115-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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