An inspiring story of mettle and optimism in the face of overwhelming challenges.
A man recounts his struggles to overcome the debilitating effects of a severe brain bleed.
On July 18, 1999, debut author Buff finished a round of golf. He returned to the clubhouse and collapsed. He was diagnosed with “a malformation of veins and arteries that are sometimes weak in places and can burst.” He underwent two microscopic brain surgeries, the first to remove the pooled blood around his cerebellum and brain stem, and the second to deal with the arteriovenous malformation. At age 36, this father of three young children saw his life forever changed. He remained in the hospital, connected to feeding and breathing tubes (the latter replaced by a tracheotomy), for six weeks. Buff reconstructed details of his hospital stay from stories he was told by family and friends; he has no memory of that period. He was transferred to Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey, where he received extensive physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and returned home in time for Christmas. But years of rehab remained ahead. Despite physical, personal, and financial setbacks, the author employs a generally positive tone in these pages: “God has blessed me with a unique personality trait. I will do something over and over again until I am satisfied with the outcome. It worked for my sports; now it was working for my rehabilitation.” Indeed, athletic activity played a significant role in his life—skiing, surfing, football, soccer, baseball, and especially golf. He highlights the stark contrast between his former routines and his post-surgery days by opening many chapters with joyful recollections of his youth followed by sections describing the initial brain trauma and his gradual recuperation. The only bitterness he displays concerns his wife’s decision to leave him in November 2000: “She would not live with a cripple the rest of her life.…I thought her love for me would stand up through all adversity. Obviously, it couldn’t.” After several years living with his parents, Buff now has his own home, drives a car, and even plays golf. His mission: to encourage others to “keep going.”
An inspiring story of mettle and optimism in the face of overwhelming challenges.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4502-2662-2
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Toplink Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2019
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
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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