An inspiring and illuminating memoir.
An Eritrean American Deafblind disabilities advocate tells the story of how she learned to succeed in a world made to the measure of sighted, hearing people.
Haben grew up in Oakland as the daughter of Eritrean parents who fled war-torn Ethiopia. Born with exceptionally poor vision and hearing that deteriorated steadily as she aged, her Deafblind world felt neither “small [nor] limited” and was instead her comfortable “normal.” Though the author’s disabilities sometimes caused her to struggle in school and daily life, her positive outlook—shaped in part by parents who had struggled to build a new life in America and playmates who treated her as “someone with gifts to share and lessons to teach”—helped her overcome the barriers that stood in her way. As a teenager, the author consciously transcended both her limitations and the protective boundaries set by her parents by learning to salsa and participating in a school-building project in Mali. She spent part of her post–high school summer at the Louisiana Center for the Blind, where she learned how to navigate with a cane and guide dog and to use a radial arm saw. In college, the author unwittingly stumbled upon her career path when she fought for, and won, the right to have the printed cafeteria menus she could not read emailed to a personal computer that translated them into digital braille. She went on to attend Harvard Law School, becoming its first Deafblind graduate. As a public service lawyer, she became part of the legal team that helped expand coverage provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act to include not just the brick-and-mortar world, but the digital one as well. Warmhearted and optimistic, the book celebrates personal courage and triumph as well as the unlimited potential of those whose real disability is living in a society that too often does not make accommodations for their physical impairments.
An inspiring and illuminating memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2872-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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