A simple, inspiring memoir.
An open water swimmer’s memoir about how she survived a traumatic year marred by heartbreak and a life-threatening health crisis.
Born covered in hair that made her look like “a little seal” and possessed of the remarkable ability to acclimatize easily to cold, often freezing water, Cox (Open Water Swimming Manual: An Expert's Survival Guide for Triathletes and Open Water Swimmers, 2013, etc.) seemed destined for the aquatic pursuits that defined her later life. As an adult, she successfully swam across the Bering Strait, the Beagle Channel, Disko Bay, and Lake Titicaca and became an unofficial goodwill ambassador between nations. Her metabolism was so efficient that she became the subject of numerous medical studies. But in 2012, Cox’s amazing body began to falter. First, her feet began to swell. Then she developed an irregular heartbeat and severe cramping in both hands. At first, she thought her symptoms were stress-induced. Her mother had passed away a year earlier, and for 25 years, she had cared for her parents. Doctors told her that her prognosis for recovery was poor and that if her body did not respond to medication, she would need a heart transplant. Unwilling to “have my heart cut out of my body,” Cox examined everything in her life, from her diet and personal habits to her friendships. She dispensed with all negative thinking and became more aware of “the things that were stressing me” so that she could handle them more appropriately. A few months later, her heart rate had become more normal and she was reacclimatizing her body to the cold by moving her hands and arms in a kitchen sink filled with ice water. Six months later, she had completely recovered. Not only was she able to swim again, but she also loved it more deeply than ever before. Told in straightforward language straight from the heart, Cox’s story is a celebration of mindful living and a reminder that few things are ever permanently out of reach.
A simple, inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94762-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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