A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.
A stirring account of New York Yankees star Posada's family's struggle with their child's difficult condition, craniosynostosis.
This is a lovely story of terrible circumstance, told by Jorge and his wife, Laura, and the authors bring a respectable polish to their honest storytelling, despite some heavy-handed sentiment and a few goofy puns: “I knew deep down that if I played my cards right, she could very well become the greatest catch of my life.” Their son Jorge Jr. came as a bit of a surprise, and the immediacy of his medical condition—a life-threatening skull deformity—hit the authors hard. In alternating voices, the Posadas write with a natural economy and immediacy of emotion: “How could I not imagine that he was going to die? It crossed my mind that this might be the last time I would ever get to put my son to sleep,” writes his mother as her nine-month-old son is readied for surgery. “Was he in pain? Was he suffering? Would he always suffer?” asks his father. These were a couple of type-A achievers who had to manage their self-involvement, irritability, exhaustion, depression and embarrassment, and find a way to patience, perseverance, fortitude and confidence. Ultimately, all those traditional virtues paid dividends. The Posadas turned their suffering into initiative, starting an advocacy group to bring help to those with craniosynostosis, funding research and offering critical support to families.
A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0308-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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