A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.
A mother’s memoir of her son’s illness and early death.
In this debut memoir, Frare recounts the story of her son Christopher, who survived a heart transplant at the age of 15 and died of cancer at the age of 22. Portions of the narrative are in Christopher’s words, drawn from essays and recordings he made over the course of his illness, and in the introduction, Frare explains her decision to list him as a co-author. As a cardiology-focused nurse, Frare found herself in a difficult position when her son was diagnosed with heart failure. She was aware of the dangers but too involved for a nurse’s traditional detachment: “The physicians expected me to be so clinical, calm, and cool. Do CPR on my own son? Were they kidding me?” Frare often writes with emotion, but an occasional stark sentence also works well, as when she offers a taste of her son’s postoperative medication regimen: “Twenty-one horse pills that smelled like skunk were the main ones, and the rest of the pills counteracted their bad side effects.” Christopher’s health continued to be uneven as he finished high school and started college, though his drug and alcohol use often tested the limits of his family’s sympathy. He got himself under control but soon after was diagnosed with cancer, which was ultimately fatal. Frare heartbreakingly ties Christopher’s story into her own process of grief, recovery, and redemption. Excerpts from Christopher’s journal present the authentic voice of a teenage boy aware that he was fighting the odds and also resentful about the end of his normal childhood: “I went to the hospital, and six weeks later I got the most worthless piece of shit contraption—a pacemaker. It totally ended my football career.” “My parents dread these periods” of his feeling unusually good and energetic, he later wrote, “not because I am feeling better but because this reinforces my existing teenage invincibility, and I listen to nothing my parents tell me.”
A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502997326
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
