A travel narrative and childrearing memoir that will appeal to those interested in shamanistic healing and other aspects of...
An account of the author’s struggles to cope with her young daughter’s troublesome imaginary friend.
Edelman (Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become, 2007, etc.) chronicles a period in 2000 when her three-year-old daughter Maya invented an imaginary friend named Dodo. At first the author consulted parenting books, friends and the family pediatrician in Southern California. However, as Maya’s aggressive behavior worsened and she started to talk about being under the control of Dodo, her parents feared the onset of an inherited mental illness, or even a spirit possession. The main drama of the story is centered on the family vacation to Belize, during which they toured Mayan ruins, investigated local culture and ancient healing traditions, and, with different degrees of comfort and faith, took their daughter to local shaman healers in search of a cure. Edelman became convinced that Maya’s problem was more than a normal developmental phase and was soon persuaded that alternative healing was having a positive effect, leading to a final ritual cure involving a bath of flowers and prayers. This immediately and miraculously led to the Maya’s renouncement of her imaginary friend and to the author’s growing belief in the efficacy of alternative-healing practices. Though Edelman is an accomplished, mostly insightful writer, the narrative is overly dependent on descriptions of her child’s increasingly dramatic temper tantrums.
A travel narrative and childrearing memoir that will appeal to those interested in shamanistic healing and other aspects of New Age spirituality.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50650-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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